The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#626 – Intelligent Routing with Sergiy Nesterenko

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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
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      The Amp Hour Electronics PodcastBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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