Quilter, the physics-driven AI for electronics design, today announced the world’s first computer designed by artificial intelligence. 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 complex, 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.
“We see this as the compiler moment for hardware,” said Sergiy Nesterenko, CEO and founder of Quilter. “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.”
How Quilter Works: Accelerating Workflows by 11x
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. Quilter then:
- Launches multiple design explorations in parallel with varying constraints.
- Identifies manufacturable layout options using built-in electrical and physical modeling.
- Allows the engineer to select, review, and lightly clean up the result.
- Outputs a fabrication-ready design.
Tony Fadell — an investor in Quilter and the product visionary behind the iPod, iPhone, and Nest — emphasized how transformative this shift will be for engineering teams.
“Everyone in hardware knows that the best PCBs are still designed by humans, track by track, over weeks of painstaking work,” said Tony Fadell, Build Collective Principal and Nest Founder. “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.”
With Quilter, engineers can spend more time focused on higher-value work such as refining architectures, integrating systems, and validating designs. And as the industry faces a shortage of experienced hardware engineers — driven by retirements, rising demand for electronics, and a limited talent pipeline — the ability to amplify each engineer’s output has become critical. By enabling weekly design cycles, Quilter gives each engineer the ability to produce 52 designs a year, whereas entire teams typically accomplish just 4 with traditional workflows. Each accelerated cycle saves time, reduces engineering overhead, and rapidly compounds learning, allowing companies to modernize their product pipelines faster than competitors still bound to quarterly timelines.
Availability
Engineering teams designing PCBs at the complexity demonstrated in Project Speedrun – from automotive to aerospace to consumer electronics – can access Quilter immediately through native integrations with Altium Designer, Cadence Allegro, and Siemens Xpedition.
- For a detailed technical breakdown of Project Speedrun, including the computer’s design, fabrication, and validation, visit quilter.ai/project-speedrun.
- Request a demo and consultation at quilter.ai/learn-more.
About Quilter
Founded in 2019 by former SpaceX engineer Sergiy Nesterenko, Quilter pioneers fully autonomous AI PCB design through physics-driven reinforcement learning. Quilter is transforming hardware development into a continuous, agile process by automating placement, routing, and verification, delivering completed designs exponentially faster than traditional methods. Quilter integrates with Altium, Cadence, and Siemens Xpedition, runs natively on private cloud and GovCloud, with on-premise deployment available for sensitive environments, and is currently under observation for SOC 2 Type II compliance. Quilter has raised $40 million to date from Benchmark, Coatue, Index Ventures, Root Ventures, and industry experts like Lip-Bu Tan, among others. Learn more at quilter.ai.
