I have spent a fair bit of time trying to `tweak' the rules but seem to reap very little improvement. When using 98 we often do several runs using the last run to make adjustments to component positions etc until we get a pretty good result that we then manually finish off (Have yet to see a Protel finished board that even comes close to being `clean' without manual intervention!!!!!). 99 for some reason has consistently taken many hours (and I mean anywhere from 5 to 20!!!) and not yet given us a single complete route even though 98 does so regularly.
Today, DXP took over 2 hours to route two tracks on a board that has been previously routed to about 90% completion - that correlates to about 780 routed tracks out of a total of around 840 - and we have given it two empty layers (the pre-routed board is 4-layers and now we have made it a 6-layer board). Having said this. Running 99 in my home office (with considerably smaller boards) I have no, apparent, problems. Getting to the stage where we might throw the file at Protel and get them to explain the problem. We have just forked out our $9000 for DXP and would expect considerably better results than we are seeing at the moment. Anything on the site that tickles your fancy :-)) Best Regards Laurie Biddulph http://www.ozemail.com.au/~boobies ----- Original Message ----- From: Bagotronix Tech Support To: Protel EDA Forum Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 7:50 AM Subject: Re: [PEDA] Stock Components/Joining nets - now autorouting My experience with the Protel autorouter is with Advanced Route 3.1 (Protel 2.8, 3.X) and the integrated router in 99se. Don't know about 98 and DXP. >From what I have seen, both AR 3.1 and AR 99SE can quickly produce 100% results which are acceptable on low to medium-speed digital boards, if the routing rules are tweaked just right. It takes quite a bit of experimentation to discover the magic rule set to achieve this. I have run the same board as much as 25 times, tweaking the rules a little each time, to get acceptable results. Fortunately, this is usually feasible since the router is so fast. All I can think of is that maybe you should tweak the routing rules to improve the results. It's the "cut-and-try" method. Laurie, that's an "interesting" website you have there ;-) Best regards, Ivan Baggett Bagotronix Inc. website: www.bagotronix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Laurie Biddulph" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Protel EDA Forum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 1:45 PM Subject: [PEDA] Stock Components/Joining nets - now autorouting Thanx everyone for their responses to my queries which were what I expected would be the answer. On another topic. We have a 4-layer board (nothing unusual mix of analog and digital components) which routes on Protel 98 in around 15-30 minutes and always achieves 100% routing. If we run the SAME artwork in Protel 99SE it takes over 7 hours and only achieves around 90-95% completion. Protel DXP is taking around 5 hours and again only 90-95% done. Does anyone have an explanation as to why the newer packages are having such a hard time? Are we missing some `setup' trick that allows these versions to run as well as Protel 98? I could understand a longer runtime (say 2-5 hours) if we finished with 100% routing and a `good' route (as opposed to one that needs cleaning up like Protel 98 usually gives) but so far the results are VERY poor. I am running on a Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and a 1GHz processor so don't see that the machine is the problem. Best Regards Laurie Biddulph http://www.ozemail.com.au/~boobies * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
