papagenoPCB: An Automated Printed Circuit Board Generation Approach for Embedded Systems Prototyping

Designing an embedded system from scratch is becoming increasingly challenging these days. In fact, the design process requires extensive manpower, comprising engineers with different fields of expertise.
While most design principles for embedded systems start with a search for a suitable computing platform and the design of proper hardware to meet certain requirements, our novel vision involves using a completely different approach: The remainder of the embedded system can be automatically generated if the application software is available. In order to achieve automatic Printed Circuit Board (PCB) generation, we describe an approach, papagenoPCB, in this paper, which is a part of a holistic approach called papagenoX. papagenoPCB provides a way to automatically generate schematics and layouts for printed circuit boards using an intermediate system description language.
Therefore, the scope of the present work was to develop a concept, which could be used to analyze the embedded software and automatically generate the schematics and board layouts based on predefined hardware modules and connection interfaces. To be able to edit the plans once they have been generated, a file format for common electronic design automation applications, based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), was used to provide the final output.