Automated PCB component placement and copper trace layout for power electronics

Speaker: Dr Gus Zhang, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Date: June 7th, 2022 at 8:00 am ET (1:00 pm BST)

Registration: Here

Abstract: Almost all power electronics PCBs are still manually laid despite the “auto-routing” and “auto-placement” functions in CAD software are available many years ago. It is also a time and material consuming process that often requires experienced engineers to take iterations of development testing stages before the PCB design goes to mass production. We have been looking into generating the PCB layouts in an automated way and optimising for energy efficiency and density, thermal distributions, and other aspects. This will potentially help the industry to build tailor-made power converters suiting individual applications. Technically, the main difficulties are the unrestricted degree of freedom on both the solution space and versatile objectives. In this webinar, the feasibility and effectiveness considerations on algorithms and data structure in computer programming of automated PCB design will be discussed, and an in-progress open-source project PEPCB will be introduced. Examples of programme generated PCBs will be demonstrated.

Biography: Dr Cheng Zhang (Gus) (S’13–M’16) was born in Wuxi, China, in 1990. He received the BEng degree (first-class Hons.) in electronic and communication engineering from the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2012 and the PhD degree in electronic and electrical engineering from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2016.

From 2016 to 2017, he was a Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, the USA from 2017 to 2018. He is now a lecturer in power electronics at the University of Manchester. His research interests include design and optimisation automation in power electronics, high-frequency ac–dc power conversions and designs and optimizations for wireless power transfer applications.