Automatic Layout Design for Power Electronics PCBs

Automatic PCB layout design is one of the emerging research interests in the theme of design automation in power electronics (DAPE), as the industry has an increasing demand in shortened design and development cycles. Several layout design strategies are available in EDA software for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits and power modules, but currently not suitable for power electronics PCBs - as the components are allowed to have arbitrary position, angle, layer, and trace are in any shapes, the layout design has a solution space of infinite dimensions which is hard to be optimized with conventional methods. In this paper, an iterative layout design workflow from circuit schematic to CAM files for power electronics PCBs based on genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. The conceptual and technical details are explained and discussed. Two practical power converters are tested to verify the efficacy and performance of the proposed methodologies and implementation.