PACE auto generates optimal power architectures in seconds
by Tomide Adesanmi, CEO at Circuit Mind
Let’s face it: when most people hear “AI” these days, they roll their eyes. I often do the same. It’s not because AI doesn’t live up to the excitement surrounding it, it’s quite the opposite. Whenever a powerful and groundbreaking technology captures our collective imagination, everyone, from seasoned experts to enthusiastic novices, jumps on the hype train, creating an avalanche of half-baked takes and shallow commentary. The real insights—the genuine gems—get buried under the noise.
Today, I’d like to cut through that noise. I’m excited to introduce a true gem: the first AI-driven power design generator specifically crafted for professional electronic engineers. Let’s dive in and explore what this breakthrough really means.
During my time at BAE Systems, developing Helmet-Mounted Display Systems for fighter pilots, nearly everyone I knew relied on WEBENCH from Texas Instruments (TI) for inspiration. For manufacturers, the “holy grail” is building software that helps electronic engineers work faster and more efficiently using the manufacturer’s components. WEBENCH achieves this perfectly, combining simplicity and functionality that is useful for professional engineers.
The issue? I didn’t want to be locked into TI’s components. TI’s catalog is solid, but depending on the design, MPS, ADI, or Microchip often had parts that better fit my needs.
Then there was complexity. For medium-to-high complexity projects, I’d need multiple regulators, each choice rippling into the next. What I really wanted was a tool that doubled as both a Power Architect and a regulator designer—seamless and all-in-one.
So, my team at Circuit Mind and I asked ourselves: Could we create a platform that blows past WEBENCH, delivering power designs with regulators from any manufacturer, crafting full power architectures, and optimizing both regulators and surrounding components for cost, size, power, and every trade-off that matters?
That platform is here, and it’s shattering our expectations of what’s possible. Meet PACE (Power Assistant to Circuit Engineers). With PACE, engineers can define their power design needs: input voltages, output voltages, and rail currents. Adjust sliders for trade-offs like cost, size, power, and availability, hit a button, and watch as the optimal power architecture and regulator design is auto generated in seconds. PACE nails every detail—voltage and current ripple, inductor values, switching frequency, duty cycle, quiescent current—even pinpointing the perfect spot on efficiency curves to match your specs.
What fires me up most is the Power Architecture generation. When you’re working with complex microprocessors or FPGAs, you’re juggling 5+ power rails. That translates to scores of potential power topologies and tens of thousands of regulator designs for each step-down or step-up conversion within those topologies—millions of options in total. No human could sift through these, but PACE does. It scours millions of possibilities to pinpoint the best topology and regulator design combos tailored to your exact needs for performance, cost, size, and efficiency.
The core algorithms generating your power design are deterministic—not AI. So, where does AI fit in? The AI magic happens upstream: it reads datasheets, extracting equations, efficiency curves, attributes, and suggested decoupling, then digitizes it all into a format that our deterministic algorithms can use when generating a design. These “digital datasheets,” built and validated at scale, are what make this leap possible.
Amid all the AI hype, I’m thrilled that Circuit Mind is delivering real automation and AI solutions to professional electronic engineers!