Automatic bus planner for dense PCBs

Kong Hui, Yan Tan, Martin D.F. Wong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Since no commercial PCB routing tools can solve the routing problem for today's complex PCBs, these circuit boards have to be routed manually, taking about 2 months of time per board. Bus planning is one of the most time-consuming steps of PCB routing. It consists of assigning buses to multiple layers of the PCB and routing them in a planar fashion on each layer. Routing congestion between on-board components and the min-max length bounds of the buses must also be considered during routing. In this paper, we present the first automatic bus planner. We tested our system on a state-of-the-art industrial circuit board with over 7000 nets and 12 signal layers. All the nets on this board were already manually routed. Our bus planner is able to achieve 100% routing completion using the layer assignment extracted from manual design. For simultaneous layer assignment and bus routing, we are able to successfully route 98.5% of the nets. The remaining 1.5% can be routed either manually or by using vias. The runtime of our bus planner is less than 3 hours on a 3 Ghz workstation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2009 46th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2009
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages326-331
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781605584973
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event2009 46th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2009 - San Francisco, CA, United States
Duration: Jul 26 2009Jul 31 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings - Design Automation Conference
ISSN (Print)0738-100X

Other

Other2009 46th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, DAC 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco, CA
Period7/26/097/31/09

Keywords

  • Bus planning
  • Layer assignment
  • PCB routing
  • Topological routing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Modeling and Simulation

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