FAQ
Contents
What's the best way to evaluate Quilter?
How is Quilter different from an autorouter?
How does Quilter use AI to generate designs?
How is Quilter different from other AI design tools?
Is it hard to learn to use Quilter?
Can Quilter generate or validate schematics?
Can Quilter manage component libraries and footprints?
Can Quilter implement reference designs from datasheets?
How many layers can Quilter support?
How does Quilter handle reference designators?
Do I have to enter physics constraints manually?
Does Quilter train on my designs?
Do you support on-premise deployments?
Where is Quilter's team located?
Adding or removing team members
How can I monitor my enterprise team's usage?
What’s the best way to evaluate Quilter?
The best way to evaluate Quilter is by starting with a known-good design you’ve previously completed. By submitting your existing schematic and board files, you can quickly compare Quilter’s output to your original layout, clearly benchmarking improvements in layout speed, manufacturability, and quality.
Quilter offers both a free version and an enterprise version, each designed to meet different user needs. The free version allows users to explore its core functionalities, while the enterprise version includes advanced features such as a commercial license and enhanced data privacy measures. With this approach, you can easily validate Quilter’s capabilities and see firsthand the time savings and layout improvements it provides. Quilter also offers free evaluation support and customized evaluation programs for enterprise customers to ensure a seamless and productive experience.
The enterprise version offers additional benefits, including a commercial license for intellectual property generated using Quilter and enhanced data privacy, ensuring that uploaded designs are not used for training data.
To start your evaluation, you can either:
Create a Non-Commercial Account to evaluate the free version by submitting designs to our multi-tenant application at https://app.quilter.ai
Request a Demo to explore the enterprise version and access support through our White Glove Evaluation Program.
Is Quilter a copilot?
No — Quilter is not a copilot in the traditional sense. While many tools aim to assist human designers and incrementally improve their efficiency, Quilter is built for full automation. It doesn’t require a layout engineer to manually guide or interact with it during the design process.
Instead of serving as a productivity booster for your top layout engineers, Quilter generates complete board layouts on its own, freeing up human resources for tasks like system-level architecture or design for manufacturing. This makes it especially valuable in R&D environments where quick iteration on low-volume boards is essential and layout resources are limited.
That said, we understand that no model is perfect. When needed, Quilter offers mechanisms to review and modify its output, but its main goal is to eliminate the need for manual layout from the start.
How is Quilter different from an autorouter?
Quilter is more than just an autorouter — it’s a complete PCB layout engine. Unlike traditional autorouters, such as the one in Altium, which only focus on routing traces and often require manual cleanup for complex designs, Quilter handles the entire layout process. This includes placement, selecting stack-ups, defining pour strategies, and checking constraints based on physical properties— all seamlessly integrated into the workflow.
Instead of making you micromanage things like widths, separations, and impedance rules, Quilter asks for a higher-level understanding (like “this net is 50Ω impedance-controlled”) and takes care of the rest automatically. This leads to more accurate, manufacturable designs — especially for complex, high-pin-count boards like DDR4 memory systems.
Most importantly, we strive for 100% completion. Autorouters often give up around 70–90%, leaving designers to sort out messy, unusable partial results. With Quilter, a design that doesn’t fully route is considered a failure. That focus on full automation, combined with physics-aware layout and rapid product evolution, sets Quilter apart.
How does Quilter use AI to generate designs?
Quilter uses a physics-driven AI approach called reinforcement learning to create PCB layouts — similar to how AlphaGo learned to play Go by playing against itself repeatedly. Instead of relying on human-designed boards as examples, Quilter explores numerous layout possibilities on its own, evaluating each with detailed physics assessments we call Physics Rule Checks (PRCs).
Over time, this self-guided approach lets Quilter continuously improve and adapt, optimizing designs based on real-world physics considerations like thermal management, EMI, impedance control, and more. Right now, our focus is on quickly generating designs for rapid real-world testing, and we’ll keep expanding the complexity and depth of physics feedback built directly into Quilter’s automated layout process.
How is Quilter different from other AI design tools?
Quilter uniquely integrates with your existing tools and delivers full PCB layout automation using physics-driven reinforcement learning. Quilter sets itself apart from other AI-driven ECAD tools with three key advantages: seamless integration, a sole focus on layout automation, and integrated physics modeling.
First, Quilter integrates smoothly with your existing design tools, so you don’t have to switch software or disrupt your workflow to use its capabilities.
Second, Quilter focuses exclusively on PCB layout automation, whereas most competing tools prioritize automating or streamlining schematic capture. Quilter tackles the challenges of component placement, impedance control, routing, and design-rule validation head-on.
Lastly, unlike other AI approaches that learn by mimicking human-designed boards, Quilter uses physics-based reinforcement learning. It autonomously generates and evaluates layouts through detailed physics simulations, ensuring each design is optimized according to fundamental electrical and manufacturing principles, not just replicating previous human-created patterns.
Is it hard to learn to use Quilter?
Engineers typically submit their first design in Quilter within minutes, making it quick and easy to learn. Quilter doesn't offer a full CAD interface, but rather replicates the conversation between an electrical engineer and a layout engineer when starting a new design.
It's designed to be intuitive and easy to use, with a super short learning curve. Most engineers submit their first design within 5–10 minutes of signing up. The intuitive interface and automated processes mean you don’t need extensive training to get started.
As you use Quilter, you’ll quickly get familiar with its capabilities and configurations. Typically, engineers become proficient after just a few submissions, rapidly iterating to refine layouts and optimize results.
Can Quilter generate or validate schematics?
No — Quilter does not generate or verify schematics. It exclusively focuses on automating the PCB layout process. Quilter assumes the schematic you provide is correct, using it as the starting point for layout generation.
By automating layout tasks, Quilter significantly reduces the time needed to produce prototypes, allowing your team to quickly identify schematic issues through real-world testing and iterations. However, schematic validation and creation remain outside Quilter’s current scope.
Can Quilter manage component libraries and footprints?
Quilter doesn't manage or create component libraries and footprints itself. Instead, it relies on the libraries and footprints you already have in your current ECAD tools. When you upload your schematic and board files, Quilter keeps and uses the footprints exactly as you defined them.
This approach ensures consistent, trusted component definitions and reduces the risk of component mismatch or errors in your designs. Quilter focuses on placement and routing, leaving you in full control of your library standards and component quality.
Can Quilter implement reference designs from datasheets?
Quilter does not directly import or automatically implement reference designs from component datasheets. However, you can manually place and route critical reference layouts — such as switching regulators or RF circuits — exactly as specified by the datasheet, and Quilter will fully respect and preserve your layout decisions.
Any manual placements or routing you provide remain untouched during Quilter’s automated layout process. Quilter then completes the rest of the design around your predefined reference areas, seamlessly integrating your precise manual implementations with automated routing.
How many layers can Quilter support?
Quilter currently supports a range of PCB layouts, from basic 2-layer designs to complex multilayer stack-ups with 10 layers or more. In reality, adding extra layers often simplifies automated layout for Quilter, as they provide more space for routing and power planes.
There's no fixed upper limit — Quilter can handle extremely complex multilayer stack-ups defined in your manufacturing profile, giving you the flexibility to meet a wide variety of design needs.
How does Quilter handle reference designators?
Quilter does not currently handle or optimize silkscreen placement. While component placements include associated silkscreen outlines, Quilter does not automatically resolve silkscreen overlaps or positioning issues.
When Quilter places components, it maintains the same relative position of the silkscreen reference designators, which can sometimes lead to silkscreen collisions.
After Quilter generates the PCB layout, you may need to manually adjust silkscreen markings within your ECAD tool to ensure readability, compliance, and manufacturability. Improved silkscreen handling is planned for future updates but isn’t available today.
Do I have to enter physics constraints manually?
No — Quilter automatically detects and extracts key physics constraints directly from your schematic. It identifies constraints such as impedance-controlled signals, differential pairs, length matching, high-current nets, and sensitive circuits through its Circuit Comprehension interface.
After Quilter extracts these constraints, you review and verify them for accuracy. You can manually adjust or add additional constraints if needed, ensuring the layout meets your precise design requirements.
Does Quilter train on my designs?
No — Quilter does not train on any paying customer designs or human-created layouts. We never collect or use paying customer data to train or improve our models. Your schematic and constraints are used only to generate your board layout, and once the job is complete, that data is discarded from the training process.
Instead of learning from human examples, Quilter primarily uses a self-play approach similar to AlphaGo. The system explores many layout possibilities on its own and evaluates them with physics simulations to learn from the outcomes. This method allows us to avoid the limitations of human-designed training data and scale learning through simulation, not customer input.
This is both a core privacy promise and a technical strategy—your IP remains private, and Quilter’s performance continues to improve without relying on customer-submitted designs.
Training policy for our Non-Commercial (Free) Tier: Keep in mind that our Terms of Use for Quilter's Non-Commercial Tier, which is free for our users, permit training on both users' direct inputs and synthetic training data generated from those inputs.
For more information on the Non-Commercial Tier Terms of Use, visit quilter.ai/terms
Do you support on-premise deployments?
Yes — Quilter supports multiple deployment options, including fully on-premise setups. You can choose to deploy Quilter:
In our standard hosted cloud environment.
Through an isolated hosted deployment on AWS or GovCloud.
Directly on-premise within your private cloud infrastructure.
For organizations with strict IP protection needs — such as aerospace, defense (e.g., ITAR compliance), or highly secretive consumer electronics firms — deploying Quilter on-premise ensures your design data stays within your secure network.
We suggest initially testing Quilter with non-sensitive designs using our hosted environments to simplify the setup. When required, an on-premise installation is fully supported and can be easily deployed on your existing Kubernetes or private cloud environment.
What are the infrastructure requirements to host Quilter on-premise?
Quilter deploys into your own Kubernetes cluster as a Helm chart. The platform creates compute jobs for component placement and trace routing, scaling resource usage based on board complexity and desired throughput.
To run Quilter self-hosted, you'll need a Kubernetes cluster with access to GPU and general-purpose CPU capacity. GPU nodes should provide modern NVIDIA GPUs with at least 16 GB VRAM. CPU and GPU requirements scale with workload — fewer resources mean longer processing times, but the platform adapts to your available capacity.
Updates and upgrades are delivered as new Helm chart versions, deployed into your cluster on your own schedule.
Where is Quilter's team located?
Our team is distributed across the United States, with significant presence in California (including Los Angeles and the Bay Area) as well as other regions nationwide.
Our team includes experts across multiple disciplines:
Electrical Engineering: Engineers with deep expertise in PCB design and industry-leading ECAD tools.
AI & Machine Learning: Specialists focused on applying reinforcement learning and simulation-driven methods to PCB layout automation.
Computational Geometry: Experts skilled in geometric optimization algorithms essential for creating efficient, manufacturable layouts.
This diverse expertise allows Quilter to provide innovative automation solutions that blend industry best practices with advanced computational techniques.
How can I delete my account?
We understand you may need to delete your account and data. Whether you are no longer using our services or simply want to start fresh, we want to make the process as easy as possible for you.
Send Us an Email To start deleting your Quilter account and data, please email our team at [email protected]. Make sure the email you send matches the one you used to sign up for Quilter. After we receive your email, our team will begin the process of permanently deleting your account and all related data.
Confirm deletion Once we receive your email, we'll send a confirmation email to verify that you're the account owner and that you want to delete it. Please reply within 24 hours to confirm the deletion. If we don't hear back from you within 24 hours, we'll assume you no longer want to delete your account, and the process will be cancelled.
Account and Data Deletion After we receive your confirmation, our team will go ahead with deleting your Quilter account and all related data. This process can take up to 7 business days to finish.
Account deletion is permanent!
Please note that once your account and data have been deleted, they cannot be recovered. This includes all saved layout jobs, generated layouts, and any other information associated with your account.
Adding or removing team members
You can easily manage the individuals who have access to your Quilter license by adding or removing team members. Here’s how:
Requesting Team Changes
To add or remove someone from your Quilter license, simply reach out to us at [email protected] or submit a support ticket through our chat bubble. Please make sure to include:
The email address of the person you want to add or remove.
Specify clearly if you’re requesting an addition or a removal.
If you want to remove an account, please specify whether you would like to:
remove it from the team's license without deleting it,
suspend it to prevent user access without deleting data, or
delete it entirely, including all Input Data, layout jobs, and submitted candidates.
Note: Accounts removed from an active enterprise license but not suspended will be downgraded to our Non-Commercial Tier. The user will be unable to submit new layout jobs until they accept the latest Terms of Use.
Adding New Team Members
When adding a new member, our team will:
Send an invitation email to the new user, prompting them to join your Quilter organization.
If they already have a Quilter account, we’ll link their existing account directly to your team license.
Ensure their account is properly configured with access permissions associated with your organization’s Quilter license.
Enable easy monitoring of their usage through your team’s dashboard.
Removing Existing Team Members
When removing a member from your team, we will:
Securely deactivate or revoke their access to your team’s Quilter license.
Confirm the removal to ensure your organization’s security and account integrity are maintained.
If you have any questions or need further assistance with team management, please reach out to our support team.
How can I monitor my enterprise team's usage?
Quilter's Usage Dashboard is a helpful tool that allows you to easily track your team's usage and see how it compares to your annual commitments.
The Usage Dashboard can help you answer common questions about your Quilter usage, such as:
How many pins total has my team used?
How many pins did we use this week / this month?
Are we on track to meet our annual commitments?
Who's using Quilter the most?
How many pin credits did my layout job consume?
Note that our usage dashboard is not real time, and data may be delayed by as much as 1-2 hours.
Accessing the Dashboard The Usage Dashboard can be accessed by clicking on the help bubble in the bottom right corner of your screen and selecting the 📊 View and explore billable usage button.
If this is your first time using the dashboard, you may need to create a separate account. Please note that this account is managed separately from your Quilter account.
Dashboard Views
The dashboard offers three primary views to help you understand your usage:
Usage Summary The Usage Summary provides an overview of all billable usage for your Quilter PO. This includes your contracted commitments, pin downloads per month, and pin downloads by users.
Usage Detail (by User) The Usage Detail (by User) view provides a breakdown of billable and non-billable activity for all users with access to your Quilter PO. This can help you identify which users are utilizing Quilter the most.
Usage Detail (by Month) The Usage Detail (by Month) view summarizes billable and non-billable usage activity by month. This can help you track your usage over time and identify any trends.
Contacting Support If you have any questions about your usage or need assistance with the Usage Dashboard, you can click the "Contact Support" button at the top of the page or send an email to [email protected]. Our support team will be happy to assist you.
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