ECU Control Module PCB Board Cloning
ECU Control Module PCB Board Cloning
The problems faced in the design of ECU Control Module PCB Board Cloning are in many aspects similar to those encountered on PCBs. Again components (cells) are to be placed and have to be connected. Many algorithms can be applied in both cases. In fact, there are a lot more publications on the VLSI aspects of these problems than on their PCB counterparts.
On the other hand, many technical constraints in PCB design are different from those in VLSI design. In this article, we focus on PCB based publications where possible. For an introduction into the specifics of VLSI design and a precise definition of what is meant by this, see, e. g., Gerez (1998), Sait and Youssef (1999), Vygen (2001).
ECU Control Module PCB Board Cloning
Most of the articles dealing explicitly with ECU Control Module PCB Board Cloning describe a PCB board cloning issue and a heuristic for its solution. The utilization of heuristics is not surprising, as the problems encountered in physical PCB layout are usually NP-hard in theory and computationally expensive in practice.
At this point, one particular feature of PCBs should be noted: The vast majority of the nets to be routed between components has only two terminals. This property is an important reason why many of the heuristics used for routing (and described later) work quite well in practice despite their simplicity.
Regarding theoretical aspects there seems to be only limited progress in recent years. On the practical side, several commercial placement and routing software systems are purchasable. Assessing their quality is very difficult, as there are no generally accepted benchmarks for PCB placement and routing publicly available.
(The situation is somewhat better in the area of VLSI design (Whitaker, 1996, Harlow, 2000).) PCB layout involves a large amount of technical and other constraints (collectively called design rules), which are specified and handled differently in each program, making any comparision difficult.
In the next section we will describe shortly the relation between placement and routing, then an overview on placement methods is presented in Section 3 and several routing models are presented in Section 4.