IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1543955
MARCH 2026 I I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE 17 based on the routing completion rate, or viewed in 2D and 3D in the browser, and you'll always get your original files back. The designer selects a candidate to work with, downloads that board file from Quilter, and it's added to their ECAD (in my case, Altium) project. We plan to improve the work- flow over time, with the goal that if all design rules and DFM checks pass in Quilter, the boards could go straight to production. Human sign-off should never be neglected, though. What market demographic are you targeting with Quilter? I've noticed it tends to be large key verticals who are most interested in this and are coming to us for deeper dive demos. Some are doing paid pilots. They are major key verticals in consumer, indus- trial, and military. When Quilter was founded, it was initially viewed only by PCB designers, and naturally their early reactions were negative and very consistent. Once we got Series B funding and an- nounced Project Speedrun, we started getting engaged with some very large electron- ics companies. They reached out to us. It was somewhat unexpected. They are the ones driving this. If you can reduce their cycle time and time to market, that's big money. Yes, these are people and companies who have suffered the most in terms of lost revenue and market opportunities due to PCB design delays, even with existing teams of very skilled design- ers. As I said, hiring new designers is an ongoing challenge. Honestly, there just aren't enough PCB designers in the world, so these companies are looking for automation. We talk a lot about the need for standards to ac- celerate innovation. Does AI in layout require new standards? Standards are critical to enabling the AI because we can partner with standards organizations and align to the standards themselves. The difficulty lies in creating standards for designers. I've dis- covered that, as a CID+ certified standards-aware designer, much of what's in the standards today is intended to guide human designers in clearly conveying their design intent. The Global Electronics Association now has a dedicated group focused on AI in design. I expect that group to identify how to fill the gaps and en- sure that the output generated by an AI tool is not just clearly documented for humans to consume, but the intent is conveyed for more automated manufacturing as well. Are you using standards as design rules within Quilter? Yes, we use IPC-2581 for our interoperability with the Allegro and Xpedition work- flows. It's the best approach, sup- ported by a well-documented standard, allowing us on the CAD side to run a script. That script gives the user the data to upload to Quilter, starting with an IPC-2581 database, along with additional metada- ta about the design itself, such as component net information and many other items not part of IPC-2581. It's considered front-end design. The workflow is that Quilter does the placement and routing, and then we put that back into the origi- nal Allegro or Xpedition design file using another script that imports the modified metadata and IPC- 2581 database, and it works cleanly. The original data file always stays intact. Standards help make this technology possible. With regard to rules, we do use physics feed- back, some of which derives from design stan- dards. For instance, IPC-2152 is the backdrop of basic temperature rise versus ampacity and ultimately trace width. Ben, this has been so interesting. Thank you for your time. Marcy, thank you. I-CONNECT007 B e n J o rd a n