A rebuild of our global routing submodule makes routing (another) 4x faster, now 27x faster since launch.

If you read our blog post from April, you may recall that Quilter is composed of 5 major submodules that handle placement, routing, and post-processing for all user-submitted layout jobs.

As a follow-up improvement to our first major router speedup in April, we’ve now also fully rebuilt our global route planning submodule, which is responsible for determining how major traces are organized and traverse the board space.

This second round of improvements meaningfully extends the already massive speed improvements we’ve unlocked since launch:

• Routing time has now improved from 6.7x → 27x faster since launch

• Total job time has now improved from 3.6x → 9.4x faster since launch

Most importantly, this means the typical successful Quilter job now explores 48 unique designs and produces 20 DRC-free, 100% complete candidates – all in less than an hour.

Our new local routing module reduces routing time by 7x, overall job time by 3.5x and improves success rates for complex boards.

Before publishing updates to our AI design engine, we first complete a standardized benchmarking process. This process – which we call ”Qtest” – ensures all changes we make push system performance up and to the right.

Qtest is composed of a suite of internal test boards that fully exercise Quilter’s capabilities against a wide range of design scenarios. For our benchmark to complete successfully, all boards in the test suite must meet or exceed previous benchmarks for:

• completion %: did we finish the design?

• manufacturability: did we design it with more conservative tolerances? (ex: trace widths)

• job duration: did we design it faster than before?

Here’s a simplified summary of results from our latest benchmark, compared against performance at the time of our Open Beta launch in mid-February:

 This benchmark shows significant improvements across routing efficiency and, as a secondary benefit, total job time:

• Routing got 7.7x faster, from an average of ~4.5hrs to 41 mins, with a maximum improvement of more than 38x 🤯

• Overall jobs got 3.6x faster, from an average of ~6.5hrs to 1hr 41 mins, with a maximum improvement of 8.3x 🚀

We've entirely rebuilt Quilter's web app to improve our job creation, submission, and review workflow.

We've entirely rebuilt Quilter's web app with a focus on "reliability" – our ability to consistently set and deliver on our users' expectations for the job they submitted.

1/ Proactively resolve job configuration issues

In the new app, we've significantly improved the clarity and rigor of our submission workflow to:

• Surface clearer and more actionable upload errors for input files

• Visually preview your board file before submission to better identify board or component-level parsing issues

• Check for common job configuration issues so they can be resolved prior to submission (ex: "You've uploaded a fully routed board – there's nothing for us to do.") 

2/ Set clearer expectations for your job

In the new app, we've created a much more clearly defined "happy path" that provides tips and information along the way to ensure you get our best results for each job you submit.

The app will also do a better job of keeping you informed as its capabilities improve, so it's always clear over time which jobs you can trust Quilter to tackle.

3/ Provide better transparency into jobs and candidates

Because Quilter jobs currently take tens of minutes to hours to produce its first successful candidate, we've invested significantly in improving clarity and transparency into the status of Quilter jobs and design candidates.

In the new app, you'll see significant changes to:

• Layout jobs summary. On the new job summary page, you'll get much more granular visibility into the status of each job you've submitted – its runtime, and the number of total and successful candidates that each job has produced.

• Layout job details. Every job details includes a clear summary of its current status as well as all the input configurations that you set when you submitted the job, making it easy to tweak and re-run design jobs.

• Candidate details. We've rebuild the candidate viewer to ensure that we're more effectively focusing your attention on the best candidates, and created new global candidate filters to help you quickly narrow your solution space with custom requirements.

Quilter's design agent can now route thin-to-thick traces to support designs with fine-pitch ICs

Quilter's "constraints manager" allows users to identify minimum amperage or trace width requirements for sensitive nets and pins so that Quilter's design agent can route those paths using beefier traces.

What happens, though, when the need for a beefy trace meets a delicate, finely-pitched connector or IC?

Previously, the answer was that Quilter failed to route your design to 100%, leaving you to finish the job it should have completed on its own.

Starting today, the new answer is: success!

As of today, Quilter's design agent can now selectively route "thin-to-thick" traces just like a human designer would, enabling it to complete layout jobs more consistently while obeying all user-defined design rules and constraints.

Quilter now uses octilinear trace routing for all generic traces routed by our design agent

Early in our closed beta, we started asking users how they felt about the visual aesthetics of Quilter designs. Here's what they told us:

• "Aesthetically, these traces look very different than my layout, and my client may not like this."

• "It just strikes me as looking messier, you know? Like just kind of how the lines go all over isn't pleasing to my eye."

• "It would be nice if there was an option to use isotropic routing style or the orthogonal routing style."

You asked, and we listened!

Quilter now utilizes octilinear trace routing (45 and 135 deg angles) for all generic traces routed by our design agent.

While it's generally a myth that curvy traces are more "manufacturable" than octilinear ones, it's hard to argue that they don't look nicer and perhaps a bit more...human?

Have other ideas for how we could improve our circuit board designs? Let us know by sharing and voting on suggestions in the "Ideas" category of our community forums.

We're excited to announce a number of improvements in our first officially versioned release.

Quilter Design Agent:

• (New) Placement algorithm has been updated to our stable reinforcement learning placer

• (New) Schematic-informed placement for Altium designs

• (Improved) Better silkscreen placement (fewer collisions, placed closer to components) for KiCAD

• (Improved) More direct routing paths between connected components

Quilter App:

• (New) "Feedback" widget for submitting bugs, feature requests, and design reviews

• (New) Help Center with documentation for submitting boards for layout

• (Improved) Ability to sort/filter successful candidates by multiple criteria

• (Fixed) Corrupted pours in exported design files (KiCAD)

• (Fixed) Failure to successfully parse boards some board files with drill holes (KiCAD)

• (Fixed) Failure to successfully parse some Altium schematics

A new way for Quilter users to define and manage design constraints.

We've launched Constraints Manager, a brand new way for Quilter users to define and manage trace width or amperage constraints for individual net classes, nets, or pins in their design.

Defining constraints ensures Quilter’s AI router will use trace widths that are appropriate for the physical and electrical constraints of the design.

After uploading your board, you can choose to define constraints (in amps or mm/mils), import constraints from a prior design, or continue without defining constraints.

Constraints manager is available today for all designs (KiCAD, Altium, EAGLE).

Schematic-informed layout enables users to upload their schematic to group related components together in layout.

Quilter users can now upload their schematic along with their board file to Quilter for compilation, enabling components that are directly and implicitly connected in the schematic to be placed together in layout.

More logical component placement should result in easier design comprehension and debugging.

To take advantage of schematic-informed placement, simply upload your root schematic along with your board file using the same name as your board.

This feature is available today for KiCAD designs, with Altium coming soon.

​Update: Altium support added in release v0.5.0 (10/11/23).