While I can't speak about Kicad's autoplace/autoroute ability as I haven't used them (I've only made small boards with Kicad, which are easy enough to route manually), for large boards, autorouting is essential to save time, and this is why companies have no problem spending tens of thousands of dollars on autorouting software to save so much time. Take a look at a modern computer motherboard for example: there's thousands of lines there. It would take an enormous amount of time to route all those signals, but autorouters reduce that time greatly.
Additionally, some things NEED to be autorouted. On high-speed buses, for instance, signal lines must be equal-length so that signals arrive at the same time. That's not exactly easy to do when manually routing, but it's trivial for an autorouter. Dan --- In [email protected], "Anders Gustafsson" <anders.gustafs...@...> wrote: > > Generally would I consider autorouting and autoplace to be evil. If you know > and understand your circuit, you make a much better job yourself. >
