Placement and Routing for Power Module Layout

PowerSynth is a tool for the generation and multi-objective optimization of power module layouts. However, this generation is limited to variations of the initial layout sketched by a designer. In an effort to provide a deeper and more thorough exploration of the resulting design space, this paper proposes a placement and routing methodology adapted from VLSI techniques to provide a more diverse set of starting point layouts for PowerSynth optimization through synthesis of a circuit netlist. An overview of this method is presented along with prototype results of a continuous, force-directed placement routine. This paper demonstrates the proposed design flow, including PowerSynth initial layout results.