#626 – Intelligent Routing with Sergiy Nesterenko

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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