PCBSmith: An Effective Schematic Generator for Testing PCB Design Tool Chain

In electronic design automation (EDA), printed circuit board (PCB) design plays a crucial role. Ensuring the reliability of the PCB design tool chain is essential, as bugs in the tool chain can cause significant issues and losses during design and production. To improve reliability, a key process is to generate numerous PCB schematics and execute them in the tool chain, to test the correctness of each tool chain functionality. However, it is a challenge to automatically generate valid schematics to simulate the actual use of the PCB design tool chain. To this end, we propose PCBSmith, an effective schematic generator for PCB design tool chain. PCBSmith mimics the steps of a PCB designer for schematic design. PCBSmith first selects the appropriate electronic components from a comprehensive library and connects them according to the constraints of different components. PCBSmith then sets electrical parameters and simulation models for each component, eventually generating simulatable schematics. Experiments show that PCBSmith demonstrates high efficiency in schematic generation, averaging only one schematic per second. PCBSmith maintains a success rate over 61.44% for generating schematics, which outperforms the baseline method by 30.68%. The generated schematics have successfully identified unknown bugs in PCB design tools.