Current limitations

A concise summary of Quilter’s current limitations, recommended applications, and optimal design parameters.

Quilter can do a lot, but there are many things it can't do yet. For a complete list of supported physics constraints, see Physics Constraints.

Recommended applications

Right now, Quilter can't typically design or optimize boards as well as skilled humans.

Quilter's main advantage is speed—it designs boards much faster than humans, can create multiple layouts at once (for different stack-ups, fabricators, and schematic versions), and can thoroughly test whether a design will work as expected through Physics Rule Checks.

Think of Quilter as a junior EE that can support and supplement your experienced layout engineers. (see Why should I use Quilter?). This makes Quilter well-suited to tackle the following types of designs:

Research & Development

• IC Evaluation Boards: Speed up lab testing with early hardware access

• Design Validation: Shorten functional validation cycles

• Connector Breakouts & Harnesses: Quick turnaround for signal access and subsystem testing

Testing & Automation

• Test Fixtures and Harnesses: Automate time-consuming internal board testing

• Environmental Testing: Create multi-channel IC test and validation boards

Time-Sensitive Layouts

• Schematic-to-Test Workflow: Skip the layout step in test board development

• Agile Prototyping: Iterate quickly with zero layout delay

• Low-Complexity Designs: Free up engineering time and avoid layout bottlenecks

Recommended design parameters

We currently recommend Quilter for the following designs:

General specifications

• <5,000 pins: Quilter is most likely to generate successful candidates for designs with 5,000 pins or fewer.

• Low to medium density designs: Quilter cannot optimize designs better than humans, so very high-density designs (>20% pin density) are best handled manually.

High-speed digital designs

• Signals < 6GHz: Quilter uses quasi-static approximations to calculate design specifications for impedance-controlled signals, which may not be accurate above 6GHz.

Low current and voltage

• Low-voltage designs: Quilter does not currently support the required physics constraints to manage creepage and arcing for high-voltage designs. We recommend manually separating high-voltage signals before submitting them to Quilter.

• Currents <4A: Quilter implements high current nets as sized-width traces using IPC calculations to prevent excessive temperature rise. Until we add the ability to generate power pours, we recommend implementing high current pours manually.