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Welcome Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter.ai!
- 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.
- Check out more on the site at quilter.ai