An analytical approach and fine-tuning strategy for PCB placement optimization

As the foundation for connecting and supporting various electronic components, Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) play an important role in modern electronic systems. The quality of PCBs physical design directly impacts the performance, reliability, and cost of the entire circuit. However, the automation of PCB physical design remains an issue that has not been fully resolved. In order to obtain high quality PCBs, component placement is the most important stage in an PCB design, and its result significantly influences both the wirelength and the overall routability of the design. Hence, we propose an analytical automated placement algorithm tailored for PCBs in this paper, including three stages: global placement, legalization, and fine-tuning. We perform an extensive study with 10 PCB designs and an open-source router. We show that the quality of our placement results is closer to that of manual. Compared to traditional algorithms, our analytical approach achieves higher routing completion rates and significantly reduces placement runtime.