From Zero to SBC in Just One Week

No doubt you’ve heard about vibe coding by now — but what about vibe hardware design? Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, that either sounds like a great way to boost productivity or a disaster waiting to happen. Whichever it actually is, it has arrived. A startup company called Quilter has just wrapped up what they called Project Speedrun. This undertaking sought to design a new Linux single-board computer at a heavily accelerated pace.

The computer is made up of two boards — a baseboard and a System-on-Module (SOM). Using traditional design methods, development of these boards was quoted at 238 and 190 hours for a single engineer, respectively. But with a boost from AI, the total engineer time was slashed to 38.5 hours, a dramatic reduction from the 428 hour estimate. Not bad for a week’s work, huh? That even leaves enough time to jet out early on Friday.

In total, the boards are populated with 843 components. It features a powerful NXP i.MX 8M Mini Quad processor, 2GB of LPDDR4 memory, 32GB of eMMC storage, Ethernet connectivity, and an M.2 connector supporting PCIe devices. All together, 5,141 pins had to be wired up and routed properly to create the circuit.

Quilter used its own physics-driven AI platform to prototype the board. Once it had done its job, the engineer mostly spent time doing cleanup work and validating the design. After a week of fixing things up, the new computer booted into Debian Linux.

It’s too early to say if this is the beginning of a big change in the field, or if things might not look so good once more light is shined on the matter. In any case, this is definitely something to watch.