Quilter

Quliter removes the manual layout bottleneck to make PCB design instant, infinite, and autonomous, so engineers can innovate instead of routing traces.

[Quilter @quilterai]

What would change if a three-month PCB design project became a one-week task?

For Project Speedrun, a single engineer used Quilter to design an entire computer, reducing layout time from 428 hours to 38.5 hours—an 11x acceleration.

https://t.co/1tziKrI0fX

[Quilter @quilterai]

@CNBC mentioned Quilter in their recent report on PCB manufacturing in the U.S.

CNBC's piece focuses on how central boards are to the AI and defense supply chains. Chips have been getting most of the headlines, but without a printed circuit board a chip is just an expensive piece of silicon. It's great to see that PCBs are starting to get the public and policy attention they deserve.

Most of the policy response in the U.S. focuses on fabrication: a proposed 25% tax credit and $3 billion in funding for domestic board makers like TTM. That addresses where boards get manufactured.

The other constraint is how they get designed. PCB layout is still weeks to months of manual work. Quilter was mentioned as a solution to accelerate the PCB layout process with AI.

https://t.co/g0n9ghTnMI

[Quilter @quilterai]

"When I do layout, the very first layout, I know I'm going to trash it. Because I'm using it to see where there's space and where there isn't."

Robert Feranec is describing a workflow most layout designers know well: a throwaway first pass to understand the physical reality of the board.

One use case for Quilter is exactly this: design exploration.

When generating a first-pass layout is cheap, you stop committing prematurely to one floorplan. You can compare a different placement strategy or a different region assignment, and see what each looks like before investing days of manual work in one direction.

Robert framed it as time savings. It's also about making better decisions earlier.

Watch the original video here https://t.co/XBS5TPmPch

[Quilter @quilterai]

Most conversations about AI in hardware swing between two extremes: it's useless, or it's about to replace everyone in the building.

Our founder @sergiynest sat down with Zachariah Peterson on the @altium OnTrack podcast for a more grounded discussion on the subject.

A few highlights:
- PCB layout is not a language problem. LLMs are good at reading datasheets and writing firmware. They are not the right tool for deciding where a component goes and how a net routes. That's geometry, physics, and manufacturing, which is why Quilter trains its own models with reinforcement learning rather than wrapping a language model.

- The realistic goal isn't a magic box. When we talk to VPs of engineering, nobody is asking for a perfect board out of a one-sentence prompt. They're asking whether a three-week layout can become one. That's a more achievable problem to solve than nailing a simple board to production perfection.

- Being honest about our limits is a feature. Customers tell us we're a breath of fresh air, mostly because we're willing to say "no, we can't do that yet." Engineers see through hype immediately, and we are tired of AI hype as much as everyone else.

Check out the conversation here -> https://t.co/bxOnSgfvSN

[Quilter @quilterai]

There's a common misconception about Quilter that we have a magic button you just push to do your PCB layout.

We don't. In this clip from our recent conversation with Robert Feranec, @sergiynest says it plainly: there's no magic button.

Quilter is a tool. A useful mental model is to treat it like a junior engineer on your team, correcting it every few iterations.

Robert makes a good point: on a 50-component board, doing layout by hand is fast enough that the value of a "junior engineer" isn't obvious. On a 3,000-component board with thousands of nets and vias, where each component can take 20 seconds to place by hand, Quilter can save you a lot of time.

You can watch the original video here https://t.co/XBS5TPmPch

[Quilter @quilterai]

Did you know that we didn't just lay out the https://t.co/M71YOmdOD9 8M Mini boards with Quilter AI?

Ben gave the boards a proper home. Project Speedrun is now a fully functional computer with a custom-made enclosure. We've joined video calls on it and played Doom. Check out the up-close glamour shots.

If you haven't heard about Project Speedrun, you can learn more here https://t.co/XYzmuy1Kvt

#PCBDesign

[Quilter @quilterai]

"We have a 6-month queue for a PCB designer's time, with no one in the pipeline to hire."

That's a US defense contractor describing the problem we hear about from almost every team we talk to: not enough engineering capacity.

The electrical engineer shortage isn't a hiring cycle. It's a 50-year structural decline.

- US electrical engineering enrollment is down roughly 90% vs. computer science since the 1980s
- 3 engineers retire for every 2 entering the workforce
- 77% of firms report difficulty hiring qualified electrical engineers

If you can't convert the hiring budget into a human engineer, you can convert it into engineering capacity in another form.

We'll be upfront: we naturally benefit from making this argument. Quilter automates PCB layout, so the team you already have can ship more boards in less time.

However, no single product can close a gap of this size. While more experienced engineers retire, industries that depend on custom electronics (defense, automotive, aerospace, energy, AI/computing) are all growing simultaneously competing for the same finite talent pool. Our goal is to be a part of the solution to this problem.

https://t.co/XPq9aFPv8V

[Quilter @quilterai]

Behind the scenes at Quilter lab! Ben is working on another hardware project. Stay tuned!

[The Hatch Agency @TheHatchAgency]

ICYMI: @QuilterAI CEO @sergiynest recently shared his POV in @politico on why onshoring PCB manufacturing is critical for the future of U.S. robotics. 🤖⚡

Read more: https://t.co/JteelqdSgO

[Quilter @quilterai]

"Technology is easy. People are hard." That's how Pooya Tadayon sums up nearly 30 years across semiconductor test, packaging, and pathfinding.

The counterintuitive piece: friction inside hardware programs gets worse as teams get more technically capable.

Our Hardware Rich Development interview gets into why, and what he learned about shipping product anyway.

Conversations like this one are the part of the work we look forward to most. We build for hardware engineers, so we spend a lot of time listening to them.

https://t.co/RRcj9QtBVa

[Quilter @quilterai]

Project Speedrun is getting a shoutout at the Embedded Online Conference next month.

Max Maxfield is featuring the board we laid out from the NXP https://t.co/M71YOmdOD9 8M Mini reference design in his session, "A Smorgasbord of Advanced Technologies." That's Project Speedrun: a Linux-capable motherboard with DDR4, ethernet, USB, HDMI, and hardware-accelerated graphics, designed with Quilter in 38.5 human hours versus the 428 originally quoted.

The conference runs May 11-15, 2026. If you want to tune in, Max is offering $100 off registration with code MAXFIELD100.

Conference: https://t.co/0j2tkfbvn0
Session: https://t.co/JT64etGwqi

[Quilter @quilterai]

We've been shipping a lot, and we are excited to show you what's new.

This Thursday, we're going to walk through everything that's landed in Quilter in Q1: Simbeor-calculated impedance profiles, ground net comprehension with region pours, a rebuilt setup flow, a new full-screen candidate reviewer, and more. We'll demo it all on a real board so you can see how it comes together in an actual design.

We're also giving you an early look at what's shipping next, including the one we know you've been waiting for: automated BGA fanouts. If you've ever burned a Friday fanning out a large BGA, this is the release you'll want to see.

Register now https://t.co/DFtuta40Ql

[Prakash @8teAPi]

One thing I learned is that launching a hardware produce may take 10+ cycles of prototyping, each cycle taking weeks for PCB layout alone… @Quilter compresses that into hours…

[Prakash @8teAPi]

The impact that SpaceX alumni are going to have on the hardware sector cannot be understated

[Quilter @quilterai]

@Apple turned 50 this month, and the WSJ published photos from inside its archive: early iPhone boards, iPod Nano prototypes, Apple Watch development hardware. Most of it hadn't been seen in decades.

Look at the first iPhone prototype in the photos. It's a tangle of boards roughly the size of a cutting board, wired together with ribbons and connectors. Everything in that contraption eventually got miniaturized to fit into a device that fits in your pocket.

Apple is a special company to us at Quilter. Our advisor Tony Fadell led the teams that built some of the products in these photos, including the iPod and iPhone.

Every generation of hardware got faster, smaller, and more capable because engineers found new ways to push the boundaries of what's possible. We are building Quilter to help accelerate the next wave.

https://t.co/FxYl9jzodQ

[Raul Izahi Lopez 🇺🇸 @raulizahi]

@konar88044 If you have also access to Design, you get a schematic and final BOM too. All automatically.

Then that design, and a basic PCB for sizing, goes to https://t.co/ianZrHlonK for layout. After that to a contract manufacturer for making it.

Great work by @quilterai!

[Quilter @quilterai]

If you've been wondering whether Quilter is ready for the boards you design, this is the fastest way to find out 👇️

On April 23rd, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko and Head of Product Richard Whitney will cover:

→ How Quilter fits into your existing ECAD workflow
→ Key milestones from 2025
→ Live walkthrough of Q1 releases on a real board: calculated impedance profiles (Simbeor), ground net comprehension, region pours, and our rebuilt setup flow
→ Early look at what's shipping next: automated BGA fanouts and clearance constraints from your uploaded files
→ Live Q&A

Register now -> https://t.co/VVrdgcKhdq

[Prakash @8teAPi]

AI:AM Takeoff https://t.co/CFMDFNVAaf

[Quilter @quilterai]

Quilter's physics-driven AI is getting better fast. Register for a live walkthrough on April 23rd.

Here's everything we shipped in Q1 2026:

- Calculated impedance profiles (Simbeor)
- Ground net comprehension and region ground pours
- Restructured setup flow with computed constraints
- Single stackup per job
- New full-screen candidate reviewer

Coming next: clearance constraints from uploaded files and automated BGA fanouts.

https://t.co/dBgmtS7oPw

[Quilter @quilterai]

We laid out an 843-component computer with Quilter AI, built the firmware from scratch, and joined a Google Meet call on it.

The board runs GNOME 48, hardware-accelerated Chromium, and live video — on a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 with a GPU that only supports GLES 2.0. Chromium doesn't support hardware video encode on this class of device, so we wrote 3 custom patches to make it work.

This post walks through every firmware decision: why Mutter 48 over 46, how we forced hardware codec selection in WebRTC, and what broke when the Vivante driver returned NULL for a GLES 3.0 function Chromium assumed existed. It also covers getting Doom and Quake running, because a computer that can't play Doom isn't really a computer.

The full Yocto layer is open source. If you work with NXP https://t.co/M71YOmdOD9 silicon or embedded Linux, the meta-quilter recipe is yours to build from.

https://t.co/HxrghloVdt