Hardware innovation is full of opportunity — yet hardware engineering remains slow, expensive, and unforgiving compared to software. This talk breaks down the real mechanics of board-level electronics development: the players, dependencies, and hidden constraints that quietly dictate your timeline. Using real project data and case studies (including a startup whose hardware failure proved fatal) Quilter AI’s Staff Electrical Engineer and EDA veteran Ben Jordan pinpoints where hardware projects actually break down, from PCB layout bottlenecks to costly respins. Then he turns to what most teams get wrong about fixing it — and what actually works instead. You’ll leave with a sharper read on where your own hardware risk is hiding, and a concrete playbook for de-risking it.
Summary
Speakers
Ben Jordan
Head of Engineering @ Quilter
Ben Jordan is the Staff Electrical Engineer at Quilter, the first physics-driven AI platform that fully automates PCB layout design. With over 25 years of experience spanning every stage of the hardware lifecycle – from schematic capture through production handoff – Ben leads the real-world design challenges that push Quilter’s AI into increasingly complex territory. His work on Project Speedrun produced the first 64-bit Linux computer placed and routed autonomously by AI. Previously, he served as a Senior Product Manager and technical advisor at Altium and Autodesk.
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