Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 12, numbers 3 and 4, 2019 // View article

Towards an Automated Printed Circuit Board Generation Concept for Embedded Systems

Authors:
Tobias Scheipel
Marcel Baunach

Keywords: embedded systems; printed circuit board; design automation; hardware/software codesign; systems engineering

Abstract:
Future embedded systems will need to be generic, reusable and automatically adaptable for the rapid advance development of a multitude of different scenarios. Such systems must be versatile regarding the interfacing of electronic components, sensors, actuators, and communication networks. Both the software and the hardware might undergo a certain evolution during the development process of each system, and will significantly change between projects and use cases. Requirements on future embedded systems thus demand revolutionary changes in the development process. Today these processes start with the hardware development (bottom-up). In the future, it shall be possible to only develop application software and generate all lower layers of the system automatically (top-down). To enable automatic Printed CIrcuit Board (PCB) generation, the present work deals mainly with the question ''How to automatically generate the hardware platform of an embedded system from its application software?''. To tackle this question, we propose an approach termed papagenoPCB, which is a part of a holistic approach known as papagenoX. This approach provides a way to automatically generate schematics and layouts for printed circuit boards using an intermediate system description format. Hence, a system description shall form the output of application software analysis and can be used to automatically generate the schematics and board layouts based on predefined hardware modules and connection interfaces. To be able to edit and reuse the plans after the generation process, a file format for common electronic design automation applications, based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), was used to provide the final output files.

Pages: 236 to 246

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2019. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2019

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x