January newsletter: 2024 roundup edition

2024: What a year!

2024 was a fantastic year for Quilter! After announcing our $10M Series A fundraise from Benchmark and launching our open beta last February, Quilter in 2025 is:

• Faster, achieving a 70x decrease in per-pin routing time compared to our initial launch in open beta;
• More capable, successfully routing boards to 100% completion with nearly 5,000 pins, a 5x increase in max pin count compared to our best results at launch;
• Smarter, now able to consider a half-dozen new physics considerations during placement and routing, and to validate its designs using our Physics Rule Checks (PRCs) framework.

2024 laid the foundations for what will be Quilter's most exciting year yet in 2025! We can't wait to share what we've been cooking up.

Quilter updates and improvements

1/ A new white-glove evaluation program

We've recently launched a white-glove evaluation experience, called the PCB Design Pioneers Program, for engineering leaders who want to benchmark Quilter's capability against existing designs without distracting their team.

After a technical demo and Q&A, we'll evaluate Quilter against your team's existing PCB designs and deliver a board performance report card and ROI analysis. No new tools, no distractions.

2/ Rename, delete, cancel your layout jobs

We gave Quilter's home and candidate review pages a design facelift, and added a handful of useful and much-requested quality of life features:

• Search and sort layout jobs using their name or submission status
• Rename or delete draft and completed jobs
• Cancel submitted jobs

These features are available to all users, today, for both new and existing jobs.

3/ Physics Rule Checks (PRCs)

In CAD tools today, DRCs (Design Rule Checks) are used to ensure a PCB layout is complete (”is everything routed?”) and manufacturable (”can it be built?”). But just because a design is complete and manufacturable doesn’t mean it will function. 

This is why we created Physics Rule Checks (PRCs).

Physics Rule Checks are fully automated “unit tests” that Quilter creates for each physics constraint defined in your schematic. After generating a layout, Quilter runs a targeted suite of PRCs to quantify the design quality of each candidate, and packages these results into a report for you to review.

In 2025, we'll be investing deeply in both the breadth and sophistication of PRCs to bring simulation-quality layout analysis directly into your Quilter design workflow, no configuration required. Stay tuned!

4/ Bypass capacitors and crystal oscillators

We added automatic detection and placement for bypass capacitors and crystal oscillators to simplify some of the most routine and tedious aspects of traditional PCB design.

We plan to continue to expand Quilter's vocabulary of physics considerations in 2025 and to make it dramatically simpler, faster, and easier to convey all the physics constraints Quilter needs to generate highly effective layouts.

Coming next

We've got lots of new changes brewing for 2025. Here's what we're planning to deliver next:

• Constraint re-use across iterations. We're making iterating with Quilter easier by enabling users to apply existing constraints to updated input files.
• Placement regions. We're adding the ability to specify placement regions that give advanced users more control over Quilter's automated component placement.
• Support for switching converters. We're adding physics constraints and PRCs for switching converters to optimize current loop minimization and enhance isolation for switching power supplies.
• Re-engineered placement and routing modules that will (yet again) deliver step-change improvements to compiler speed, capability, and design sophistication.

It's going to be a great year!