At 3 ps of skew per inch, a 15 to 20 inch differential pair arrives at the receiver with 45 to 60 ps of skew, about half the unit interval of a 10 Gbps signal. In the final part of his fiber weave series, Dr. Steve Arar compares the ways to reduce it, from spread glass and NE-glass to matching your pair's pitch to the glass weave, and what each one costs you. Bill Hargin of Z-zero peer reviewed it. quilter.ai/blog/fiber-weave-…

The U.S. share of global PCB production has fallen from 30% to 4%. Most federal funding, including tens of billions through the CHIPS Act, has gone to chip manufacturing. A chip is just an expensive piece of silicon until it's mounted on a PCB that connects it to power, memory, and the rest of the system. The engineers who design those boards are retiring faster than new ones replace them. Read our CEO @sergiynest new article in Electronic Design on why PCB design is the bottleneck U.S. reshoring efforts haven't addressed electronicdesign.com/technol…

When we published this graph a few months ago, it drew a lot of comments from our community. Some of you said it matched what you see when you hire EE/PCB design roles. Others disagreed entirely. So we invited four engineering leaders who hire electrical and PCB layout engineers to join our webinar panel and take on the question: is there really a shortage of electrical engineers? All four either hire electrical and PCB layout engineers or are directly impacted by the hiring trends: Milton Santos, Engineering Manager at Allient Akshay Budhiraja, Head Engineer at Agility Technologies Corporation Chris Denney, CTO at Worthington Assembly Frank Monaco, VP of Engineering at Simulator Product Solutions They'll talk about which roles are hardest to fill, how the talent gap shows up on a contract manufacturer's floor, and what their teams are doing about hiring. We are cohosting this webinar with our friends from @hardwarefyi. October 8, 9 AM ET/12 PM ET luma.com/9rs2line

We're proud to announce that Dr. Eric Bogatin has joined Quilter as a Technical Fellow. Dr. Bogatin is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, former technical editor of Signal Integrity Journal, and the author of 18 technical books, including Signal and Power Integrity: Simplified, widely regarded as the standard reference text for practicing engineers. His career spans more than four decades, including senior positions at Bell Labs, Raychem, Sun Microsystems, and Ansoft. As a Technical Fellow, Dr Bogatin will advise Quilter's physics and engineering teams and publish original technical content on Quilter's platform. In the words of @sergiynest, our founder and CEO: "Eric wrote the textbook that most engineers in our field learned from. Having him engage with what we're building is both an honor and a proof that Quilter is on the right path toward solving one of the oldest industry problems."

Quilter’s Project Speedrun is a finalist in the Artificial Intelligence category of Fast Company’s 2026 Innovation by Design Awards. We’re honored and a little stunned. See the full list here fastcompany.com/innovation-b…

“Whether or not a PCB layout or design is good is computable.” Our CEO @sergiynest joined the AI and Design podcast from CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute hosted by Nikolas Martelaro to talk about why Quilter is taking a different path from most AI tools. Here are key highlights when it pertains to PCBs design: 1. Imitation of existing designs has a ceiling, physics does not. A lot of AI tools learn by mimicking human behavior. We all know how powerful it can be for text. For printed circuit boards, if a PCB layout is 99% right, the remaining 1% can still kill your whole board. Moreover, if a model learns from existing expert layouts, how do we know that all of those layouts were optimal? Quilter starts from physics instead. Whether a layout works can be computed from electromagnetics and thermodynamics. So we optimize against that directly. 2. "Vibe coding" hardware has a hard limit. For simple boards, yes, hobbyists are experimenting with vibe engineering. We've seen a mechanical engineer with no EE background ship a PCB after a few hours with KiCAD and Quilter. That works when the board is simple and the stakes are low. But for anything with real complexity nobody serious is prompting their way to a validated layout. 3. Constraints are at the heart of layout automation. Before you can automate anything, you have to capture what "good" means for this specific board. Across a real design, that can be tens of thousands of constraints. No engineer is going to manually capture all of them. Sergiy talked about 3 possible approaches: a chatbot that interrogates you, tables you fill in and verify, or direct selection on the schematic you already know by heart. The truth is nobody has solved how to design the best human-AI interface for that yet, including us. The discussion went beyond the traditional PCB topics and touched on how to hire engineers in an era where AI tools are expected, why deleting from your design until things break is a better practice than adding features, how to stay focused on one problem when agentic tools make it cheap to build anything. Take a listen: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… open.spotify.com/episode/5aw…

@CNBC mentioned Quilter in their recent report on PCB manufacturing in the U.S. CNBC's piece focuses on how central boards are to the AI and defense supply chains. Chips have been getting most of the headlines, but without a printed circuit board a chip is just an expensive piece of silicon. It's great to see that PCBs are starting to get the public and policy attention they deserve. Most of the policy response in the U.S. focuses on fabrication: a proposed 25% tax credit and $3 billion in funding for domestic board makers like TTM. That addresses where boards get manufactured. The other constraint is how they get designed. PCB layout is still weeks to months of manual work. Quilter was mentioned as a solution to accelerate the PCB layout process with AI. cnbc.com/2026/06/03/beneath-…

"When I do layout, the very first layout, I know I'm going to trash it. Because I'm using it to see where there's space and where there isn't." Robert Feranec is describing a workflow most layout designers know well: a throwaway first pass to understand the physical reality of the board. One use case for Quilter is exactly this: design exploration. When generating a first-pass layout is cheap, you stop committing prematurely to one floorplan. You can compare a different placement strategy or a different region assignment, and see what each looks like before investing days of manual work in one direction. Robert framed it as time savings. It's also about making better decisions earlier. Watch the original video here youtube.com/watch?v=aXjcSAsH…

Most conversations about AI in hardware swing between two extremes: it's useless, or it's about to replace everyone in the building. Our founder @sergiynest sat down with Zachariah Peterson on the @altium OnTrack podcast for a more grounded discussion on the subject. A few highlights: - PCB layout is not a language problem. LLMs are good at reading datasheets and writing firmware. They are not the right tool for deciding where a component goes and how a net routes. That's geometry, physics, and manufacturing, which is why Quilter trains its own models with reinforcement learning rather than wrapping a language model. - The realistic goal isn't a magic box. When we talk to VPs of engineering, nobody is asking for a perfect board out of a one-sentence prompt. They're asking whether a three-week layout can become one. That's a more achievable problem to solve than nailing a simple board to production perfection. - Being honest about our limits is a feature. Customers tell us we're a breath of fresh air, mostly because we're willing to say "no, we can't do that yet." Engineers see through hype immediately, and we are tired of AI hype as much as everyone else. Check out the conversation here -> youtube.com/watch?v=YJTbsoxP…

There's a common misconception about Quilter that we have a magic button you just push to do your PCB layout. We don't. In this clip from our recent conversation with Robert Feranec, @sergiynest says it plainly: there's no magic button. Quilter is a tool. A useful mental model is to treat it like a junior engineer on your team, correcting it every few iterations. Robert makes a good point: on a 50-component board, doing layout by hand is fast enough that the value of a "junior engineer" isn't obvious. On a 3,000-component board with thousands of nets and vias, where each component can take 20 seconds to place by hand, Quilter can save you a lot of time. You can watch the original video here youtube.com/watch?v=aXjcSAsH…