Here are few pictures which tell a story of how most of the circuit board design software’s doing a component placement job.

Schematic with decoupling capacitors

Component Placement on PCB1

Component Placement on PCB 2
The placement Picture shows how badly the CAD tools have badly messed up placement. With bad placement the objective of placement of capacitors closer to the device stands nullified. It is important that decoupling capacitors are placed closer to the power pins of the device in correct orientation with the shortest path possible with thick traces which can offer lower inductance path for the current flow.
From our experiments the auto placement results were poor when using under following conditions:
- Irregular Board outline
- Segregating high voltage circuits from low power circuits
- Placement of high speed components around on the board to minimise noise and get good signal integrity on the signals.
Hence most of the designers prefer to perform the component placement of the board and then use or don’t use auto routers for quick layout.
Component placement should ideally have knowledge about:
- What the circuit is all about? It should know what are components, power, clocks, reset, high speed circuits, smd/through hole footprints, constraints? Without this knowledge any placement engine output is just not complete.
- It should understand the board outline, placement constraints, pcb layers.
- It should understand netlist which most of the routers use for current optimal placement. All components are placed so that the nets/traces can have shortest distance between the device and receiver.
At circuit tree we care about this problem and are working to solve this problem. We believe that by offering intelligent part placement of our design solutions designers can use auto routers or manually route the board to significantly reduce the time it takes to complete the design.
This new feature is under development and showing promising results. Stay tuned to know when we start offering this exciting new feature.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.