Intro

Exploring the journey of Quilter, a startup founded after a harrowing experience at SpaceX, where a manually designed circuit board caught fire due to errors, leading to the development of automated PCB design for accuracy right from the beginning.

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Episode notes

Episode 128

I spoke with Sergiy Nesterenko 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 (and am at 66 on Spotify). 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 :)

Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub 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