Circuit Partitioning for PCB Netlist Based on Net Attributes

Abstract

As we all know, the difficulty of automatic placement and routing is proportional to the size of the circuit. Through Printed circuit board (PCB) netlist partition algorithms, PCB circuits can be divided into different sub-modules, and the problem scale can be effectively reduced in order to obtain the optimal automatic layout and routing. It is observed that when engineers design circuits, they usually mark important nets by annotation, called net attributes. This paper proposes a PCB netlist partition approach based on net attributes. Our partition approach takes the netlist as input, and module partition set as output. Firstly, the modules are pre-partitioned using net attributes. Further, the special patterns in circuits are discovered, and the scattered resistors, capacitors and other components caused by pre-partitioning according to net attributes would be allocated to initial modules by classifying and module matching rules. Our method is evaluated on 11 PCB netlists, and experimental results show that our proposed netlist partition approach outperforms the state of the arts, which can achieve 80%–96% partition accuracy.