The code of both front-end and back-end of the autoCircuits service was self-generated. The front-end is based on standard HTML with some PHP and Javascript components. The back-end is written in the MATLAB language, supported by a few third-party libraries and components. The Author would like to acknowlege, in particular:
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The MathWorks, through its italian support team, made available a set of MATLAB licenses for enabling the autoCircuits calculation back-end. These licenses fall under a TAH (Total Academic Headcount) bundle available through the Politecnico di Torino, whose support is warmly acknowledged.
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| BLAG |
Drawing a circuit diagram from its abstract supporting graph description is not a trivial task. The current implementation of the autoCircuits service uses the BLAG (Batch Layout Generator) software component, which is part of the GDToolkit (Graph Drawing Toolkit). Please find more details in the techical paper authored by Giuseppe Di Battista, Walter Didimo: GDToolkit. Handbook of Graph Drawing and Visualization 2013: 571-597). BLAG is here used to find initial coordinates of nodes of a planar embedding of the circuit graph. These coordinates are then post-processed to obtain the final circuit layout.
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The typesetting software for the automated generation of the circuit PDF files is, of course, LaTeX. In particular, the PSTricks package is used to provide a set of PostScript macros that enable the construction of aesthetically pleasing circuit diagrams. The adopted circuit drawing package is pscirc, which builds on PSTricks, and which was developed several years ago by two Author's colleagues Prof. I. Maio from Politecnico di Torino and Prof. A. Premoli (who unfortunately passed away few years ago) from Politecnico di Milano. |
S. Grivet-Talocia received the Laurea and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy, in 1994 and 1998, respectively. From 1994 to 1996, he was with the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA. He is currently a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering with the Politecnico di Torino. He co-founded the academic spinoff company IdemWorks in 2007, serving as the President until its acquisition by CST in 2016. He has authored over 150 journal and conference papers, and one technical book. His current research interests include passive macromodeling of lumped and distributed interconnect structures, model-order reduction, modeling and simulation of fields, circuits, and their interaction, wavelets, time-frequency transforms, and their applications. Dr. Grivet-Talocia was a co-recipient of the 2007 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging. He received the IBM Shared University Research Award in 2007, 2008, and 2009. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility from 1999 to 2001 and as a Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology in 2016-2017. He was the General Chair of the 20th and 21st IEEE Workshops on Signal and Power Integrity (SPI2016 and SPI2017). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.