Model Identification to Validate Printed Circuit Boards for Power Applications: A New Technique

The idea of using model identification techniques in order to validate the design of printed circuit boards (PCBs) is proposed in this communication. With the term identification, it is intended to obtain the mathematical model of a system from input/output data. Actually, the quality requirements of PCB systems working with power devices are highly demanded by costumers of semiconductor companies. Due to the increasing market of power devices, the topic is of wide interest. In this note, a new approach is presented. It is based on both CAD techniques, used to simulate the board, and identification techniques, mainly based on linear models, to validate the board performance in the design phase. The main results regarding the analysis of the PCB design allow to establish if the PCB CAD procedures can be improved in order to elicit the parasitic effects aiming at compensating possible nonlinearity in the systems, thus providing the customers with reliable and simple models.