Quilter
Quilter is physics-driven AI that automates printed circuit board placement and routing. Engineers upload a schematic and board outline from their ECAD tool, then receive ranked, fabrication-ready layout candidates in native formats within hours rather than weeks.
What is Quilter?
Quilter, operated by Allegro Labs, Inc., is a software-as-a-service platform that automates printed circuit board layout using what the company calls physics-driven AI. Rather than assisting a designer, it takes on the whole placement and routing job: you prepare a schematic and board outline in Altium, Cadence Allegro, OrCAD, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad, upload the files, and Quilter returns completed layout candidates in those same native formats.
The approach sets it apart from a conventional autorouter. Quilter's models are trained by reinforcement learning against the laws of physics, from Maxwell's equations to thermodynamics and manufacturing constraints, using synthetic boards produced by simulation. The company is explicit that it never trains on human-designed boards, scraped layouts or customer intellectual property, and compares the method to the way AlphaGo learned Go. It also insists it is not an autorouter, a co-pilot or a large language model.
Each job produces dozens to hundreds of candidates, ranked by routing completion, by manufacturability with no DRC violations allowed, and by a set of physics rule checks covering ground plane overlap, overheated trace length, differential length mismatch and trace width accuracy. You filter the results by layer count, trace width or fabricator rules, pull the chosen board back into your ECAD tool, adjust it and resubmit. Most boards go through two to five cycles before the engineer is satisfied.
Quilter is candid about its current envelope: roughly 100 to 1,000 components per board, best performance around 2,000 to 5,000 pins, pin density under 20%, and through-hole vias. BGA fan-out generation is in beta, while blind and buried vias, length matching and RF routing remain in development, RF nets being meant for the engineer to pre-route before upload.
Two deployment models exist: a managed cloud on AWS with an isolated workspace and a claimed SOC 2 Type II audit, or a self-hosted install inside the customer's own AWS and Kubernetes environment, which can run fully air-gapped. A permanent free tier covers academic, personal and eligible exploratory use, while commercial access is priced per project by unrouted pin count and goes through the sales team.
What it does
- Places components automatically on the board
- Routes traces automatically under physics constraints
- Generates dozens to hundreds of layout candidates per job
- Ranks candidates by routing completion, manufacturability and physics checks
- Runs physics rule checks on ground planes, trace widths and differential pairs
- Exports finished layouts in native ECAD file formats
- Runs parallel jobs on the same board for side-by-side comparison
When to use Quilter / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Quilter is the right fit.
When to use Quilter
- Electrical engineers who want board layout off their critical path
- PCB designers running several placement and routing options in parallel
- Funded hardware startups with no in-house layout engineer
- R&D and engineering managers clearing a board backlog without new headcount
- Students, academics and researchers using the permanent free tier
When not to use Quilter
- Teams looking for schematic capture, which Quilter does not generate
- Engineers who need advanced circuit simulation or signal analysis
- Very dense designs above roughly 1,000 components or 20% pin density
- Projects that depend on blind and buried vias or length matching, both still in development
- Buyers who need a published price list before talking to a sales team
How to use Quilter
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Prepare your schematic, board outline and constraints in your usual ECAD tool
- Create a project and upload your design files to Quilter
- Select your stackup and enter your fabricator's constraints
- Define the physics comprehensions that apply to your circuit
- Review and edit the constraints Quilter has inferred
- Pre-route any critical sections yourself, such as RF nets, high-voltage traces or BGA fan-outs
- Submit the layout job, optionally running several variants in parallel
- Review the ranked candidates and filter by layer count, trace width or vendor rules
- Download the chosen candidate back into your ECAD tool and adjust it
- Resubmit and iterate, counting on two to five cycles before fabrication
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Turns layout work measured in weeks into work measured in hours or days
- Models are trained on physics and synthetic data, never on customer boards
- Unlimited iterations and parallel jobs at no extra cost within a project
- Standard output files, with no proprietary format and no lock-in
- Priced per project and per pin rather than per seat, so a whole team can iterate
- Permanent free tier for academic, personal and eligible exploratory work
- Self-hosted option keeps designs inside the customer's own AWS environment
Cons
- No public pricing: any paid project requires a conversation with sales
- Narrow technical envelope of 100 to 1,000 components, under 20% pin density, through-hole vias only
- Length matching, blind and buried vias and RF routing are still in development
- On the free tier, board metadata and input files feed model training puzzles
- The Acceptable Use Policy restricts sharing your output with an employer or third party
- No GDPR mention, no published DPA and no EU representative
- Human cleanup is still required: the flagship example needed 38.5 hours
Pricing & Plans
Quilter provides a permanent free tier at no cost, covering academic, personal and eligible exploratory use with unlimited iterations. Paid access is charged per project, based on the number of unrouted pins at the moment of upload rather than per seat, and requires no annual licence. No amount is published on the site: the lowest paid price point is not disclosed and must be obtained from the sales team.
- permanent free access for academic
- personal and eligible exploratory professional use
- private data on public cloud
- documentation and community forum support
- unlimited iterations and all product features
- reserved for organisations under 10 people and under 50K USD revenue
- board metadata and input files are used to generate training puzzles
- price on request
- for commercial
- professional and business use
- public cloud
- private cloud or on-premises deployment
- expert SLA-backed support
- unlimited iterations
- team and site management
- full commercial access at startup pricing with unlimited iterations
- reserved for funded hard tech startups
- a limited number of places
- granted on application
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Quilter handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on Quilter's site. The privacy policy, last updated on 14 August 2025, and the terms of service were both checked in full, and neither refers to the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Economic Area, EU data subject rights or standard contractual clauses. The only privacy framework claimed is Californian: the policy sets out CCPA rights under Cal. Civ. Code 1798.100 et seq., covering access and deletion, and states that Quilter does not sell personal information. No Article 27 EU representative is designated, no data processing agreement is published or offered, and no data protection officer is named; privacy requests go to legal@quilter.ai. The terms are governed by California law, with arbitration in Los Angeles. European buyers should treat this silence as a gap to raise directly with the vendor.
Who owns the data?
Quilter's pricing FAQ states plainly that the customer owns the output: the project files are yours to download, fabricate and modify, in standard formats with no lock-in. The terms confirm that you must hold the rights to your Input and that you remain responsible for both Input and Output. Quilter, for its part, retains all intellectual property in its own assets, in the Synthetic Training Data derived from uploads, and in Usage Data. One clause deserves attention: the Acceptable Use Policy forbids using your Output with any third party, your own employer included, without Quilter's written permission. Any feedback you send is assigned to Quilter outright.
Reuse rights
Customers can download their layout candidates, fabricate them, modify them and reimport them into Altium, Cadence Allegro, OrCAD, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad without asking permission, since the output is a standard board file with no proprietary wrapper. That freedom stops at the Acceptable Use Policy, which bars sharing the Output with a third party, an employer included, unless Quilter agrees in writing, and bars using it to compete with Quilter. On the free tier, board metadata and input files are used to build Synthetic Training Data; enterprise designs are excluded from training altogether.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Quilter offers two hosting models. Its managed cloud runs on AWS, giving each customer an isolated workspace described as SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, with no infrastructure to manage. Alternatively, Quilter can be self-hosted inside the customer's own AWS environment, where the data never leaves their infrastructure and they control access, networking and data residency; technically this is a Kubernetes-native application delivered as a Helm chart, requiring NVIDIA GPU resources and able to run fully air-gapped. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest using TLS 1.3 and AES-256, and Quilter states that every design job is processed in isolation and deleted on completion, with no shared training data between customers. One element is missing: no hosting country or region is named anywhere on the site for the managed cloud. The domain's resolved IP address is a Cloudflare anycast node and says nothing about where customer data actually sits. Organisations with data residency requirements should ask Quilter directly, or opt for the self-hosted deployment.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Quilter.
- Read the Acceptable Use Policy before any professional use: it bars using your output with a third party, your employer included, without Quilter's written consent
- On the free tier, uploaded board metadata and input files feed training puzzles, so designs under NDA should not be submitted there
- Free tier eligibility depends on company size and revenue, and crossing those thresholds turns free use into a licensing question
- Handing layout to an automated engine can quietly erode a team's hands-on routing skill, so keep engineers reviewing what the tool produces
- Ranked candidates look authoritative, yet the vendor itself insists on human review and its own benchmark still needed 38.5 hours of cleanup
- With no published price, budget exposure stays unknown until a sales conversation takes place
- SOC 2 Type II is claimed but no report or attestation is published, and the privacy policy may be changed without notice
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate for cloud use, demanding for self-hosting. In the cloud you create an account, upload your ECAD files and manage no infrastructure, but you still have to prepare a schematic, board outline and constraints properly, so this remains an engineer's tool rather than a consumer one. Quilter includes about ninety minutes of guided onboarding with one of its engineers on your first project, alongside documentation, a help centre, a community forum and a 32-minute video walkthrough. Self-hosting is a different matter: a Kubernetes cluster, a Helm chart, tens of gigabytes of RAM, NVIDIA GPUs and identity provider integration.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Quilter
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does Quilter actually automate?
Which ECAD tools does it work with?
How much does Quilter cost?
Does Quilter train its AI on my designs?
Who owns the boards Quilter produces?
How many iterations can I run on one project?
Can I run Quilter on my own infrastructure?
Is Quilter GDPR compliant?
Does Quilter offer an API?
What is the minimum age to use Quilter?
Should you pick Quilter?
Quilter is one of the rare AI tools that does not ask you to imagine where it fits: it removes a single, well-identified bottleneck, the placement and routing of a printed circuit board, and leaves the rest of hardware design alone. That focus is its main strength. The technical story is coherent too, since training on simulated physics rather than on scraped human layouts genuinely answers the intellectual property objection that stops most enterprise AI pilots, and the option to self-host inside your own AWS environment answers it again for teams that cannot send designs anywhere.
The limits are stated openly, which is worth crediting. Quilter tells you its comfort zone runs to about a thousand components and under 20% pin density, that blind and buried vias, length matching and RF routing are not there yet, and that most boards need two to five cycles of human review. Its own flagship comparison still records 38.5 hours of engineering cleanup. This is a tool that compresses layout work, not one that abolishes it.
Two reservations matter before adoption. The first is commercial: nothing is priced publicly, so any serious evaluation starts with a sales conversation. The second is legal, and it is sharper. There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere, no published data processing agreement and no EU representative, which sits awkwardly with a product courting aerospace, defence and semiconductor customers. The Acceptable Use Policy also restricts using your output with your employer without written consent, a clause that free tier users in particular should read closely.
For an engineer curious about where automated layout has reached, the permanent free tier is a genuinely low-risk way to find out. For a company, the technology looks ready and the paperwork looks unfinished.
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