An Automatic Placement Tool for Rapid Prototyping of Printed Circuit Boards

This report describes a fully automatic placement tool for PCBs (printed circuit boards), nap (nonhierarchical automatic placement) that combines approaches from several different placement heuristics developed both for PCB and VLSI chip placement. Although the problem of placement for a PCB can be abstractly cast into the same formalism as the problem of VLSI cell placement, a practical tool must incorporate many additional features. In this report we describe the impact of incorporating these PCB-specific features as well as other constraints imposed by the CAD environment (that is, the schematic capture system and the automatic routing tools) into an automatic placement tool. Next we discuss the selected heuristics and their associated data structures in detail. Following this discussion, we present the results of using the placement tool on two test cases along with an analysis of the tools performance. Finally, we identify the limitations of the current implementation and we propose some possible solutions and future work.