A Study On Application of Genetic Algorithm to Automatic Placement of Parts on Printed Circuit Boards

Abstract

For computer aided design (CAD)/design automation (DA) for printed circuit board (PCB), automatic placement of parts has been strongly needed. It is, however, very difficult to realize the automatic placement, since the parts have wide variety in size and these parts should be placed under various constraints.
This paper studies a method of placement on the PCB using genetic algorithm (GA). This paper also studies an application of a new representing method for maintaining diversity of chromosomes to the GA. Simulations are done to show the feasibility of the new automatic placement method. A chromosome is converted into multiple phenotypes by the methods.