Listen to your hosts Dave Jones & Chris Gammell talk about electronics design and the electronics industry in general. If you have any interest in electronics at all, from hobbyist/hacker/maker to engineering professional you'll find something of interest here.
Just prior to recording, Chris saw that Dave had been talking about a different “AI autorouter”
Configuration on Quilter is currently pretty simple (not a lot
Sergiy worked at SpaceX in 2014 doing a bunch of boards for testing
“PCBs were the tail end of the design, so it became the critical path”
Check out some of the public designs on the Quliter Blog
Quilter has remade the schematic of the OpenMV camera. This reworked board is indicative of the kinds of boards they can handle.
Generally sub-300 MHz, Sub 2A
Quilter has a full time EE on staff who helps try out different designs and give feedback.
They can parellelize designs by sending them off to a cluster for processing.
Chris noted that it felt similar to Place and Route on an FPGA.
Quilter doesn’t currently enforce “octolinear traces”, so the traces aren’t straight lines.
It makes it possible to detect generative designs, like on the “QPlayer” example
The toold helps by defining manufacturing constraints for you, specifically around available board houses.
Cost of compute
How do you balance the problem of knowledge? Chris and Dave discussed this for newer engineers in episode 625
“What is the job of a PCB?” (perfectly replicate a schematic)
Quilter is doing additional checks, including solving for Maxwell’s equations and Thermodynamics
There are decisions to make within the routing algorithm, ie. Should they enforce “star ground”?
When starting out, there was skepticism around code compilers! But over time people came to trust them more and more.
How can you try out Quilter? Sign up for waitlist! The best candidat designs will be:
Sub 2000 pins
sub 100 parts
sub 100Mhz
sub 2A
Open source designs
All the boards on the site have no human input
When trying out the service, many customers don’t trust the first board (but later they start to)
Spits boards back out as the same file format, they currently support KiCad, Altium, Eagle
NASA story designing S band antenna
When starting with new boards, the tool will import outlines by parsing layers in KiCad / Altium / Eagle.
Reconsidering different elemetns of a design (constraints)
Relaxing constraints (physics)
Software models
Why don’t some of these tools exist in layout software? Specifically simulation and physics engines.
Many do! (Ansys, TDK, etc). Often the cost isn’t justified for simpler boards, so people go without.
Feeding back real world squishiness into the model
Costs – Not yet set, but there will be different tiers for hobbyists and open source designs. Sergiy mentioned $50/month for non-enterprise, but it seems like it’s much too early to tell.