The Thermal-Circuit High-Speed Collaboration Layout Design for an Electronic System With Multi-Agent Method

Recently, electronics systems have become more complex resulting in a need for system design method that considers multiple physical phenomenons. However, it is difficult at the electronic system design level to reduce the design time and realize high precision. We have developed a collaborative highspeed thermal/circuit design method with a modularized model [1–2]. In this paper, we reconsider the optimization method of this design system. We obtain the local minimum solution for a very high-density device system. However, because the constraints associated with both thermal and electrical design become very strong, we applied an agent-oriented optimization method in defining the boundary conditions between device module and board module to ease the constraints on the thermal layout design. This method is characterized by making the design for device module design intelligent. In a case study, we achieved more than a 20% improvement in the design solution in the Pareto curve. We also reduced the design time by more than 10 times (one weight pattern: about 30sec, Pareto solution set: about 600sec). This enables the designer of electronics system to compare Pareto solution sets within a short time and to evaluate many different layout designs during the rough design phase of a system design.