New features have materially extended the size, density, and complexity of boards Quilter can handle, eliminating the most common manual setup step required of customers.

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESS Newswire / July 8, 2026 / Quilter, the physics-driven AI that automates PCB layout, has shipped BGA fanout automation, removing one of the major manual steps that customers had to perform in their ECAD tool before submitting a dense board to the platform. The release headlines a run of 2026 updates that have materially extended the size, density, and constraint complexity of boards Quilter can route end-to-end.

The focus of the year has been to take every piece of design intent that engineers have already expressed in their ECAD files, and turn it into something Quilter reads, respects, and routes against. Earlier versions of the platform made calculated guesses about certain inputs, which worked on simpler boards but produced friction on complex ones. The 2026 releases have systematically replaced those guesses with first-class capabilities.

Automated BGA fanout, released in beta and still undergoing active development, is the largest single capability addition of the year. Ball grid arrays are the densest components on most modern boards. Application processors, FPGAs, and high-pin-count connectors regularly have hundreds or thousands of solder balls packed under a single package, and routing the short escape paths from each ball through vias and trace segments has historically been the first thing a PCB designer does by hand before any other routing begins. Until this release, Quilter customers had to complete that step manually in their ECAD tool before submission.

Quilter now generates fanout and breakout automatically as part of standard candidate generation, selecting via patterns, escape directions, and breakout traces for each BGA based on the surrounding placement, the stackup, and the rest of the board's routing. Coverage extends to standard-pitch BGAs, dense BGAs, and the irregular ball patterns common on application processors and high-density connectors. Because Quilter selects the fanout itself rather than routing around one a customer drew by hand, routing quality on dense designs improves alongside the time saved.

Other updates shipped over the first half of 2026 include:

• Projects group every iteration of a single design into one place. Most Quilter customers iterate 2 to 4 times on a board, and the new structure makes that workflow explicit.

• Calculated impedance profiles compute impedance for differential and single-ended impedance-controlled signals across every layer of a board based on the customer's stackup materials, powered by the industry-standard Simbeor solver by Simberian.

• Editable impedance constraint overrides let engineers override Quilter's calculated impedance values for individual net classes directly in the app and remove the previous limit on supported targets.

• Ground net comprehension give engineers explicit control over which ground net Quilter uses on each ground layer, and enabling region-scoped ground pours for boards with multiple ground domains.

• A restructured setup flow surfaces every stackup layer, material property, and fabricator constraint affecting routing, each visible and editable before submission.

• Custom component proximity constraints, a new constraint type, let engineers specify that one component must sit within a defined distance of a specific pin on another component, directly in the app.

"How much of a layout an engineer hands to Quilter is the engineer's call," said Sergiy Nesterenko, founder and CEO of Quilter. "What customers shouldn't have to do is hand-encode work for Quilter that they've already expressed somewhere else in their files. The 2026 releases are about closing that gap."

Two further releases are in active development. Full clearance constraint support is in active development, letting Quilter read net-class clearance rules, layer-specific clearances, and pair-specific clearances directly from input files. Support for blind and buried vias, which will extend Quilter to HDI and other multi-tier via designs, is next.

The full product update details are available on the Quilter changelog.

About Quilter

Quilter is enterprise-grade, physics-driven AI that automates printed circuit board layout design. Engineers upload a schematic and board outline, and Quilter handles component placement and routing end-to-end, turning weeks of manual work into hours while keeping engineers in full control. Unlike legacy auto-routers or LLM-based tools, Quilter reasons from the physics of the board to produce complete layouts in your native ECAD format, with physics checks applied as each candidate is built. Quilter supports Altium, KiCad, Cadence, and Xpedition files, and is available as a cloud platform or on-premise deployment. Learn more at quilter.ai.

Contact
Iryna Zhuravel
press@quilter.ai

SOURCE: Quilter