  We consider the design problem for a Marx generator electrical network, a
pulsed power generator. The engineering specification of the design is that a
suitable resonance condition is satisfied by the circuit so that the energy
initially stored in a number of storage capacitors is transferred in finite
time to a single load capacitor which can then store the total energy and
deliver the pulse. 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 comment on the nontrivial
nature of this structured real eigenvalue assignment problem and present two
possible approaches to determine its solutions. A first symbolic approach
consists in the use of Gr\"obner 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 show that the symbolic method easily provides solutions for
networks up to six stages while the numerical method can reach up to seven and
eight stages. 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.
