The Gradient Podcast - Sergiy Nesterenko: Automating Circuit Board Design

Episode 128

I spoke with Sergiy Nesterenko (  / sergiynest  ) about:

Developing an automated system for designing PCBs

Difficulties in human and automated PCB design

Building a startup at the intersection of different areas of expertise

By the way — I hit 40 ratings on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) (and am at 66 on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/6onNcSq.... It’d mean a lot (really, a lot) if you’d consider leaving a rating or a review. I read everything, and it’s very heartening and helpful to hear what you think.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Sergiy is founder and CEO of Quilter. Sergiy spent 5 years at SpaceX developing radiation-hardened avionics for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy's second stage rockets, before discovering a big problem: designing printed circuit boards for all the electronics in these rockets was tedious, manual and error prone. So in 2019, he founded Quilter to build the next generation of AI-powered tooling for electrical engineers.

I spend a lot of time on this podcast—if you like my work, you can support me on Patreon (https://patreon.com/DanielBashir?utm_...) :)

Reach me at [email protected] for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

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Outline:

(00:00) Intro

(00:45) Quilter origins and difficulties in designing PCBs

(04:12) PCBs and schematic implementations

(06:40) Iteration cycles and simulations

(08:35) Octilinear traces and first-principles design for PCBs

(12:38) The design space of PCBs

(15:27) Benchmarks for PCB design

(20:05) RL and PCB design

(22:48) PCB details, track widths

(25:09) Board functionality and aesthetics

(27:53) PCB designers and automation

(30:24) Quilter as a compiler

(33:56) Gluing social worlds and bringing together expertise

(36:00) Process knowledge vs. first-principles thinking

(42:05) Example boards

(44:45) Auto-routers for PCBs

(48:43) Difficulties for scaling to larger boards

(50:42) Customers and skepticism

(53:42) On experiencing negative feedback

(56:42) Maintaining stamina while building Quilter

(1:00:00) Endgame for Quilter and future directions

(1:03:24) Outro

Links:

Quilter homepage (https://www.quilter.ai/about)

Other pages/features mentioned:

Thin-to-thick traces (https://blog.quilter.ai/thin-to-thick...)

Octilinear trace routing (https://blog.quilter.ai/octilinear-tr...)

Comment (https://x.com/tomfleet/status/1758573...) from Tom Fleet


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