An evolutionary design methodology of printed circuit boards for high-speed VLSIs

As operation frequencies of the printed circuit boards (PCBs) increase in keeping with VLSI frequencies in the GHz domain, two independent serious problems occur in the PCB design. One is waveform distortion problem, or signal integrity (SI) degradation problem, in PCB traces. And the other is power-supply drop problem, or power integrity (PI) degradation problem, in PCB power planes. Those problems are barely able to be overcome on case-by-case empirical designs conventionally. In this paper we newly propose a design approach for each problem, both of which are based on the genetic algorithm. And we obtained improvement ratios of more than double compared with the both conventional designs for SI and PI degradations, respectively.