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AI Hardware Linux

Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt (tomshardware.com) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the it's-alive dept.
Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. "Holy crap, it's working," exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom's Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first time it was powered up. The Quilter team reckon that the AI-enhanced process it demonstrated could unlock a new generation of computer hardware makers.
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Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt More

Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt

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  • Beowulf cluster? (Score:5, Funny)

    by blue trane ( 110704 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:17PM (#65862959) Homepage Journal

    Can you imagine AI designing a beowulf cluster to ... ?

  • Hmm...cribbed from the SoC application notes? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:24PM (#65862971)

    There's all sorts of good stuff in the application notes of IC catalogs. Some of it not even copyrighted.

    Came across a Burr-Brown (!) catalog in the library at work about 15 years back. And I was thinking...why would our professionally staffed research library keep a vendor catalog from a defunct company? And then I opened it and saw a whole cook book for high frequency analog designs.

  • So they are not only lazy but stealing other people's work as well.
    Welcome to the age of AI.

    • Re:Dual-PCB = someone else's design (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:49PM (#65863041)

      Yes that's how electrical engineering works. Engineers "steal" the work vendors put into their datasheets, hook-up diagrams, interfacing requirements, standard layout requirements, etc.

      This is literally how it all works. Precisely no one designs something truly from scratch without using someone else's work, and that work is published along with the components you buy.

      • I buy evaluation boards - eg LPC845BRK; nearest one at hand - just so I can swipe the various circuits I might need. They give you a nice PDF with the circuits laid out - often in logical blocks, like power, USB, SD card, etc - so you can just cut-and-paste their design.

        • Indeed eval boards often are just an idealised implementation of the datasheet recommendations. I've done the same in the past.

  • Quilter's PCB *layout* FTW (Score:5, Informative)

    by doof_debug ( 1102605 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:33PM (#65862995)
    Quilter user here. I think the subject is a bit misleading. Quilter performs the often difficult, always tedious job of PCB layout. Someone, likely a human, actually designed the schematics, uploaded the KiCAD or Altium project files to Quilter and *it* did the layout.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Thanks for the clarification. I was already wondering, since I had so far only terrible experiences when trying to get some AI to design even the most mundane little schematics. This being only about the component placement and trace routing is more believable.
  • It's just going to string along a whole bunch of instructions from random tutorials that it ingested.

    What's going to get interesting is in a few years those websites and forums that have been used to train the AI are going to dry up. GitHub is going to dry up too because a lot of the projects they are are from people either in college or putting together a portfolio to get a job and is just not going to be enough jobs for people to be bothered with either of those two things. Anyone going to college is

  • Your AI designed personal computer! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:37PM (#65863021) Homepage

    Q: What's in the box?
    A: We don't really know, lol, but it seems to work okay!
    Q: Will it keep my data secure?
    A: There's no way to know, let's just hope for the best!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To be fair, the same is true of a lot of human designs too. Lots of modules and highly integrated ICs used, all basically black boxes. Not as bad, but certainly not immune to screw ups either.

      I wonder if it passed EMC and ESD.

    • This is how we get SkyNet.

    • A: There's no way to know

      Dumb take. AI designed the PCB layout. It didn't chose the parts or the design. The people know the level of data security provided in 100% the same way as if they had not used AI.

  • "The Quilter team reckon ..."  Enough, already. If I want to read AI-text I'll watch UTUBE.

  • Hmm, I'm not convinced (Score:4)

    by hwstar ( 35834 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @08:50PM (#65863043)

    full signal integrity and thermal analysis? What about design for manufacturability and test? There's a lot of iteration and back and forth between sales and marketing
    requesting changes after a spec has been written, the high level design has been done and approved too.

    Engineering a product from scratch is really all about finding out what you don't know and then trying to architect the design as the unknowns become knowns, while mitigating the design risk. Its sort of like reducing a sauce in cooking. The design "boils down" until you get the essence of what you want.

    Now, if AI could handle this high level design process as well as do the schematic capture and PCB layout, that would be a game-changer.

    Schematic Capture and PCB layout is also very iterative process, typically because there are still unknowns when theses processes are started. When something is "discovered" to be a problem, it causes an "avalanche" in the design which can end up changing quite a bit. If these "avalanches" aren't managed well, you end up with board respins.

    Also, just because this board booted the first time, doesn't mean that 1000 or 100,000 units will boot the first time, or run without crashing over its entire temperature and voltage spec. To validate that you still need very complicated testing regimes.

    • Good points! Besides, the article points out "one week" of AI and "38.5 hours" of human work.. In my book, that is one week of a person sitting and using a tool. The peraon is responsible here, and did that person practise good engineering? If the goal was to boot first time, then yes. If the goal was to satisfy significant reliability and manufacturability requirements along with form and function... probably not, I imagine.

    • Comments like this are why some of us grit-eaters are still here. Nicely explained!

  • A.I. should be able to design the circuitry in much less than an hour.

    • If it doesn't do it in under 30 minutes, the next one's free!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mattr ( 78516 )

      Apparently they did nightly runs and then reviewed them.The baseboard took 27 hours of compute time, the SOM took 15 hours of compute to get to 98.7%. The human effort of 38.5 hours replaced 428 quoted human-only hours. It's apparently a cloud service, so I guess you can't rent your own machine and speed it up.. though if it is a physics heavy simulation maybe they were running an A100 or something? At any rate, it took a *lot* of compute but saved a *lot* of time. Based on Claude finding and digesting this

  • As in finding the reference design and putting that on a PCB? Color me non-impressed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by djgl ( 6202552 )

      Yep,
      https://www.quilter.ai/project... [quilter.ai]
      and
      https://www.nxp.com/design/des... [nxp.com]
      are VERY similar.

    • Well yes. Just copying a PCB design can still take a significant amount of effort. Here is a typical example of AI: It's a tool used to assist designers in doing the things they would do anyway, just reducing time.

      Yeah the end result is no more impressive than any traditional work. But the traditional work would have produced something similar in longer time. The "impressive" thing here is just a time reduction, nothing more.

      Reference designs are used the world over for good reason.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        The story is what is called a "lie by misdirection" because it implies something (the "AI" did a design from scratch), that is not true. I get that this idea is too advanced for you.

  • Each buggy, broken iteration before that, not so much. But when they finally unfucked the design, the final iteration totally booted up on the first attempt!

  • But after reading about the training, I am not doubtful at all, it's 100% lies: "The AI behind this tool is basically trained by playing an optimization game against the laws of physics."

    Any PCB design engineering will tell you this is genuine BS.

    • How? That's not something I have any experience with at all, but isn't it a process of trying to optimize the length of each conductor so the signals arrive at the best time? Like I said, I don't know, so please tell me how that's wrong. You have piqued my curiosity.

      • Any PCB design engineer will tell you this is BS. When you do the PCB layout you do not use "the laws of physics". You use concepts that have many ramifications, like "signal integrity" (use transmission lines with an uninterrupted return path, match the length of buses/pairs, compute impedances required by each specific interface), power delivery networks (PDN, watch out for copper width/thickness, design proper decoupling according to how each component works (frequency, di/dt draw, etc), avoid shared ret

  • "With just one week of AI-powered processing, augmented by 38.5 hours of human expert assistance"

    Then it isn't "made by AI" then, is it? It's similar to letting an LLM write a letter that later requires heavy editing.

  • WTF (Score:3)

    by fuzznutz ( 789413 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2025 @09:22AM (#65863811)

    The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs

    Either the builder or the writer does not know what a single board computer is or how dual PCBs does not qualify. Hint: The B in PCB stands for board.

    • Glad to see at least a couple of people comment on this. Apparently words don't mean anything anymore. It's like those ads for crap that claim "free shipping, plus call now and get a second one absolutely free! Just pay a separate fee!"

      • That and the headline reads as if the components were designed by AI. Ordering of prepositional phrases matter, people.
  • who created a lot of new designs
  • In the photos, I see two boards. In the headline, it says two boards. The article says 2 boards. The summary says "complex Linux single-board computer".

    Someone goofed, right? It's not some esoteric engineering convention where you can call a 2-board computer single-board?

  • The plagirism bot combined a bunch of things that were not created by it or the people who made the bot and it spit out a conglomoration of other people's work. Not a surprise. The issue is whether that's an acceptable way to do things or not.
  • I'm waiting for the next level where I can upload a series of datasheets of products and tell AI to wire up the components so they work and it just figure it all out.

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