Quilter Demonstrates AI-Driven PCB Design Completed in Under a Week

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Quilter announced that it has completed the printed circuit board (PCB) design for a computer using artificial intelligence tools in less than a week, a process that typically takes engineering teams several months.

The startup, founded in 2019 by former SpaceX engineer Sergiy Nesterenko, said a single engineer was able to take a schematic through to manufacturing-ready files in under a week. Traditionally, this stage of hardware development requires a full team and multiple redesign cycles. The effort, known as Project Speedrun, marks a significant milestone for the hardware industry by demonstrating that quarter-long R&D cycles can be compressed into rapid, week-long experiments.

The Project Speedrun computer design is based on the widely used NXP Semiconductors i.MX 8M Mini processor, an embedded platform commonly deployed in automotive infotainment, safety, and machine-vision systems. Quilter said the system was fully functional on first boot, supporting tasks such as video calls and gaming—an uncommon outcome in PCB development, where three to five board respins are often expected.

According to the company, professional PCB designers estimated that manually creating the same two-board system would require 428 hours of labor, including 238 hours for the baseboard and 190 hours for the system-on-module (SOM). Using Quilter’s AI-driven workflow, 98% of placement, routing, and physics validation was completed autonomously in 27 hours. A single engineer then spent 12 hours finalizing the baseboard and 26.5 hours refining the SOM, resulting in an overall acceleration of roughly 11 times, with peak gains of up to 20 times on the baseboard.

Project Speedrun

Quilter’s platform uses physics-driven reinforcement learning to generate manufacturable board layouts. Engineers submit a schematic, and the system produces multiple physics-validated designs, reducing the need for manual placement and routing of components and traces.

"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 the 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 and the founder of Nest and a co-developer of the iPod and iPhone, said, "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 said its technology integrates with Altium, Cadence, and Siemens Xpedition design environments and can be deployed on private cloud and government cloud infrastructure.

Click here to learn more about Quilter's Project Speedrun!