On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Brad Velander wrote:
> Steve,
> can't help you with your routing problem, routers are a big mystery
> to me. Nobody I have worked for has ever had boards that they would trust
> to, would work with, nor would they shell out for, an autorouter.
It depends what you expect from them. The board I'm currently running is
7*3.3", with 3300 pads, very few of which are on a conventional bus - no
memory arrays. It's also blessed with 12 supply voltages, many of which
have local planes. Even at an incredibly optmistic 20 seconds per pad,
that's 18 hours - more realistically, it's about 5 times that. (Specctra
would be done in about 4-6 hours). I'm better than Specctra on any given
net, and I don't paint myself into a corner as often as it does, but it's
far, far faster. For nets I care passionately about, I'll always check its
output, but for run-of-the mill stuff, even if I can see a way to do a net
better, I'll leave the specctra output alone - twiddling with a board for
weeks isn't normally profitable, especially for prototype boards, where
the first prototype run may or may not work at all, let alone subtle EMC
issues... Getting the softies something to work with while I work on rev 2
seems to be much more efficient. (This is all for short timescale
stuff. People with relaxed timescales obviously have different options)
One thing that autorouters also help with is placement - if the autorouter
can't make a good start very quickly, odds on the placement or
ruleset needs a tweak.
> Are you aware that Protel 'suggests' that they only support 12
> characters in the footprint name?
Yeah. Don't know it it still applies, but that's my uniqueness limit.
Steve
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