Power Circuit -

Ideas
,
1

I’m curious if other have had any good expiernece with power circuitry layouts.

  • buck converters layouts - any example layouts that have gone pretty well here.
  • any constraints that help it
  • thoughts generally, do folks just lay this out themselves and let Quilter take it from there? I haven’t tried that but something I’m looking forward to playing with.
2

Hi @justin!

As luck would have it, we just released support for switching converters in the circuit comprehension module. It looks something like this in the app:

switching converter
switching converter1776×744 49.7 KB

This will let Quilter know that U1 is a switching converter, with L1, C4 and C8 as the critical peripherals, leading to a tight placement of those components:

placement
placement876×548 55.2 KB

Next week we’ll also be shipping a “physics-rule-check” based on this input that checks that the placement and routing of the converter was executed well.

For similar cases that don’t fit this pattern perfectly, there are a couple of other things you can do:

  1. You can define “placement regions” that components must respect. In Altium, this literally just amounts to using the rooms features. In KiCAD this would be done with rule areas. You could then make a small placement region that must contain these components, and they would at least be grouped together in that region.
  2. Switching converters often come with many caps supporting them - be sure to define these as bypass caps!
  3. You can always place and route critical regions of the board yourself and leave Quilter to do the rest. Not our ideal use-case but it’s a stop gap for things Quilter can’t do well yet.
3

That is great news, appreciate the update. I’m excited to try out some of that new functionality - and seems like the roadmap is really good as well.

Thanks for great progress on your product

1 Like
4

@sergiy - q.

Given 99.9% of switchers are going to have a datasheet/app note with at least one recommended layout…

I’d be looking at getting the platform to source, and recognize/interpret that data successfully as basis for subsequent stages!