On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 07:10:34PM -0500, harry eaton wrote: > but nothing beyond 6 layers. It is rare indeed that more than 8 copper > layers are required. Usually when 10 and 12 layer boards are made it is > because the designers are lazy. > > The Pentium processor chip has only 7 wiring layers; it must be of "medium > to low" complexity!
Harry, I think this brings up an interesting point, you need to use the right tool for the job. With that I mean that there are "classes" of tools for various complexity levels on a design. For the complexity levels that I think the gEDA tools aim today I agree that more then 12 layers should be very rare. But I can on the other hand say that at work we have very few boards (if any) that would be routable on a 12 layer PCB. I have worked on several designs that required 20 layers to be routable for example. But that doesn't really matter because we would not be able to use gEDA/PCB for layout work for so many other reasons so I consider what we do at work as a different complexity level that the gEDA tools currently don't aim for. But for my home projects PCB is a great tool and exactly what I need to do the job, which is a job of much lower complexity. When adding features to a toolset I think the main reasons should be to make sure that you solve the painpoints of the current userbase (so they don't move to some other tool) and also figure out what other potential users groups there are what features they would need in order for them to consider your tool. Is there a group of potential users what would consider using PCB if it supported more then 8 copper layers ? If so, adding this support I think is a great idea. Thanks -- Daniel Nilsson
