LOS ANGELES -- Quilter today announced the creation of the printed circuit board design for a computer using artificial intelligence tools in under a week.
The startup company, founded in 2019 by former SpaceX engineer Sergiy Nesterenko, said a single engineer completed the layout taking a schematic to manufacturing-ready files in less than a week, a process that traditionally takes an entire engineering team months and requires multiple rounds of redesign. This initiative, called Project Speedrun, represents a major milestone for the hardware industry, demonstrating an ability to compress quarter-long hardware R&D cycles into rapid weekly experiments.
Project Speedrun based its computer design around the widely used NXP i.MX 8M Mini processor, the same embedded computing hardware commonly used in automotive infotainment, safety and machine-vision systems. The system was fully functional upon first boot, capable of handling the demands of video calls, video games, and more – a rare outcome in printed circuit board (PCB) design, where projects typically build in as many as 3-5 respins when scoping.
Professional PCB designers quoted 428 hours of manual labor to create the same two-board system that Project Speedrun would produce; 238 hours for the baseboard, and 190 hours for the System-on-Module (SOM). With Quilter, 98% of the placement, routing, and physics validation was completed autonomously in just 27 hours. A single engineer required only 12 hours to clean up the baseboard and 26.5 hours to clean up the SOM, which represents an 11x acceleration overall and a peak of 20x improvement on the baseboard.
Quilter works by using physics-driven reinforcement learning to explore manufacturable board layouts. Instead of placing hundreds of components and routing thousands of traces manually, engineers simply submit a schematic and let the AI generate multiple physics-tested designs to choose from.
"We see this as the compiler moment for hardware," said Nesterenko,. "What used to take a team months now happens in days, which means you reach market months, if not a year, ahead of competitors. That’s how hardware will be built from now on."
Tony Fadell, an investor in Quilter, founder of Nest and a codeveloper of the iPod and iPhone, commented, "Everyone in hardware knows that the best PCBs are still designed by humans, track by track, over weeks of painstaking work. Quilter blows that bottleneck apart. Just like Cursor supercharges great software engineers, Quilter gives top PCB designers the superpower to turn weeks into days. It’s a complete paradigm shift. When you iterate faster, you can out-innovate your competitors."
Quilter integrates with Altium, Cadence, and Siemens Xpedition, and runs natively on private cloud and GovCloud.
