CPDFDD - Postdoctoral Fellowship
Abstract
While electronics are an essential part of the modern age, the tools currently used to design the printed circuit board (PCB)-level circuits have largely stagnated on graphical schematic capture. While this computerizes traditional circuit drawing flows, this also forces designers to work at the lowest level of abstraction, that of individual components and wires. Recent work in the human-computer-interaction (HCI) field has focused on heavily automated synthesis-based flows to support novice designers and makers. However, it is unclear how well fully automated approaches would scale to more advanced use cases where the acceptable design space is smaller and requires more specialized parts. This project aims to take the best of both worlds through a symbiotic design approach: raise the level of design to spare human designers from the tedious low-level decisions, but still allow humans control over the low-level designs should they need it. Furthermore, these tools should also help the human designers understand the design spaces they’re working with, potentially even supporting design with intelligent automated first-cut choices. As libraries are a crucial part of a high-level design system, this project also intends to fully support user-defined libraries, components, and subassemblies and investigate issues and solutions to supporting community effects, ideally replicating the success of the open-source software community. An end goal is a combination of reports on findings and an open-source, permissively-licensed suite of tools that can improve on graphical schematic capture while maximizing design efficiency and minimizing design pain.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 05, 2021
- Source ID
- HR00112110008
Entities
People
- Ankur Mehta
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- University of California Regents