Entwicklung und Implementierung eines Tools zur funktionsorientierten Erstellung von Leiterplatten-Designs in KiCad

Abstract

This master thesis adresses the topic of design automation in electronics design. Specifically, a tool is developed to automatically generate schematics and layouts from a high level description and therefore reduce the manual labor involved in these steps. The presented solution is build upon the open source Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) package KiCad and is implemented in Python to easily interface the Python KiCad Application Programming Interface (API). The work focusses especially on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) layout process. Here, predefined circuit blocks are used. Placement of the circuit blocks on the circuit board results in a problem with a huge solution space. The development engineer lacks the time to iterate and weigh different layout variants against each other. We adress this problem by formalizing the rules applied by human designers and implementing them as algorithms to be applied by the design automation routine. This way a higher number of sulutions can be evaluated compared to the manual process. A weighting system is introduces to allow optimization of the designs for certain design parameters. To evaluate the capabilities a prototype of the tool it is applied to the design of a spacecraft power distribution mudule and the potential for future applications are outlined.