Towards PCB physical design automation: architectural analysis and synthesis

The use of architectural definition tools to ensure the validity of early designs is crucial to avoid costly rework of the product architecture by catching potential design errors before starting detailed physical realization. Design automation tools with analysis and synthesis capabilities at both component and board levels can be the key to the design of today's complex systems with shrinking design margins. While chip level synthesis tools have relatively matured over the past years, board level synthesis tools are just recently making their way into the commercial reality. In this paper, the board level architectural analysis and synthesis problem is addressed. A set of guidelines for tool evaluating and usage for architectural and physical design at the board level is presented. Board synthesis is described in the context of the overall physical architectural design with tasks such as signal integrity verification, thermal management, reliability assurance and EMC/EMI checking.