Meet Cooper: Get a Working Board Without Becoming a Layout Engineer

Cooper reads your board, finds the setup mistakes that turn into respins, and fixes them with you before you route. The problems show up on your screen today, while they still cost minutes instead of a month.

I talk to a lot of engineers and designers. For a real cohort of them, the only thing that counts is what the finished board does; the board design itself is a stepping stone. If that is you, the layout is just the toll you pay to get there.

Your company has experts for the layout. A central PCB design team, real specialists. But that team is finite, and the demand for it always runs ahead of the supply. So you file your request and you wait. Sometimes you get the help. Sometimes you lose the queue, and the project moves anyway, because the project was never the PCB. It was the product the PCB goes into. So you open the layout tool and do it yourself.

You are not a layout engineer by trade. You got drafted. And that is where the problems begin.

If the board is already broken at setup, routing doesn’t stand a chance

Most boards that fail were broken before a single trace got routed. Maybe a net never got marked as a differential pair, or a power plane got filed as a signal layer, or a clearance came in tighter than you intended. The router did its job. It just worked from a bad setup, and no router can honor a constraint you never set.

This was never a tools problem. Your EDA tool is fine. The gap is process and help: the setup work a layout expert would catch at a glance, and that you, drafted into the job, have to find the hard way, when your board comes back and doesn’t power on. Or worse.

So the choice is simple. Catch the setup mistake now, on your screen, while it costs you minutes. Or catch it at the fab house, where it costs you a spin and a month.

Meet Cooper

Cooper is a layout reviewer built into DeepPCB: the senior set of eyes on your setup that you usually wait in line for.

“Add a GND and +3V3 plane, fix the USB diff pairs, and route it.”

Cooper is built to get you to a finished board fast. General consumer-focused AI is built to keep you talking, because the longer it holds your attention the more it earns. Cooper isn’t. We want exactly what you want: the straight answer, the finished board, the shortest path between them.

How Cooper works

We ran Cooper on a simple board: the STM32L4 + nRF24 2.4GHz RF-to-USB dongle that anyone can download. On the first read it flagged four setup problems a DRC pass slides right past, including two inner copper layers set as power planes with no net assigned, so the board had no real ground reference or power plane at all. We fixed them in Cooper and routed the board clean on the first pass.

Here’s what Cooper does:

• It reads before it touches anything. Cooper reads the whole setup in seconds: net classes and types, differential pairs, planes, clearances, track widths, the stack-up. The first thing you get back is a plain summary of what it found, so you catch the misclassified plane or the unmarked pair while it is still cheap to fix. That is the trust layer.
• It fixes in one pass. Tell Cooper what you want in plain language: mark the USB nets as a differential pair, add a ground plane, widen the 5V rail, route the high-speed signals first. Approve the work once and it applies everything together, so fixes that depend on each other stay consistent. You never click through hundreds of pins, and you never open your layout tool to do it.
• It routes when you say go. Run the whole board, the high-speed nets, or a single net by name. Cooper sets up and drives the work; the DeepPCB engine does the routing, hits 96% mean completion, and stays DRC-clean. Cooper never touches your connectivity. Your netlist stays exactly as you drew it.

Explore the live project and check the work yourself at app.deeppcb.ai.

Stay in control of your own board

The board comes back the way you expected, because the setup errors got caught before routing. No surprise spin.

Layout was never your job, and you don’t have to become a layout engineer to get a clean board. What you get instead is self-sufficiency, and with it, control. The board is yours end to end, so the result is yours too. No waiting on a queue you can’t see into. No respin because someone else’s setup was off. Nothing fails on account of something outside your hands. Cooper brings the expertise; you keep your hands on the wheel.

And the boards that used to beat you, you finish. On a dense design with hundreds of nets across a dozen layers, the limit was never effort. It was how much you could hold in your head at once. Cooper lifts that ceiling.

Try it on your board, today

Upload a board. Let Cooper read it. See what it finds.

Pay as you go. If Cooper’s read of your board does not impress you, you lost a coffee. If it does, you just saved a day or a week.

Sign up and try your board at app.deeppcb.ai.