If you are looking at commercial tools as well, you can take a look at: http://www.tarayinc.com/overview.php
Udi On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:44 AM, Ben Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Projects with microcontrollers and FPGAs often have a lot of flexibility > in how things get connected. My workflow for those projects is to build > a sparsely connected schematic and then move to PCB to explore geometry > options. Once I see what will be easy to route in PCB I start making > connections based on the physical layout. Sometimes I do this by picking > a starting pin and assigning them sequentially in gschem (FPGAs make this > fairly easy, at least with "linear" packages). Sometimes I use 'D' and > 'Shift-D' to annotate pins or bring up the whole package in PCB so I know > which pins I can consider and then just route them (with auto-DRC disabled, > kind of a bummer) and use the conflicts to back-annotate the PCB. > > I'd really like to be able to do a couple of things more easily: > > 1. I'd like be able to express the design requirements in gschem and > have them visible in PCB. For example, I'd like to say "connect this > SRAM address bus to this bank of FPGA pins... somehow" and see that in > PCB. Some kind of "meta rat" that would help me see both the geometry > and the pins that are in play. > > 2. I'd like to be able to resolve these dependencies (even in the absence > of 1, as today) by drawing lines in PCB and having the info get back to > gschem automatically. Perhaps by adding a wire+netlist attribute+busripper > at the appropriate pin. > > Does anyone know if/how good commercial tools do this? > > Any ideas for how to express a "meta rat"? How to visualize it? How to > specify it in gschem, in a netlist, etc? > > Any better ideas for how a line drawn in PCB could be automatically driven > back to a schematic? Perhaps as a "rat" in gschem?? > > -- > Ben Jackson AD7GD > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://www.ben.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ > geda-user mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user >
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