Design of Marx generators as a structured eigenvalue assignment

We consider the design problem for a Marx generator electrical network, a pulsed power generator. We show that the components design can be conveniently cast as a structured real eigenvalue assignment with significantly lower dimension than the state size of the Marx circuit. Then we present two possible approaches to determine its solutions. A first symbolic approach consists in the use of Gröbner basis representations, which allows us to compute all the (finitely many) solutions. A second approach is based on convexification of a nonconvex optimization problem with polynomial constraints. We also comment on the conjecture that for any number of stages the problem has finitely many solutions, which is a necessary assumption for the proposed methods to converge. We regard the proof of this conjecture as an interesting challenge of general interest in the real algebraic geometry field.