Lorenzo, On Thu, 02 Sep 2010, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
> Look around and you'll see that most people don't actually use > autorouters (unless for unimportant tracks, like led lines). Most of my > work is mixed signal (in industry) so good luck telling your 'average' > autorouter to: 1) drop power vias to the bypass capacitor on the other > side of the power pin, 2) correctly do guard rings about instrumentation > amplifiers, 3) switching power supplies layout where you have to do > kelvin sense (and it's actually only one net) 4) be actually so smart to > don't route your bridge sense lines near to said power supplies 5) star > routing ground and power supplies ... and so on. I hear you. It seems that it might take longer to teach an autorouter all of these things than routing the board manually. All that seems to result is a crude approximation that needs to be redone manually anyway. > I actually used the kicad autorouter for inspiration when pulling the > last tracks on a busy board (where last tracks are usually unimportant > things like logic pull-up networks and buzzer drivers :D). > > Please note that I haven't said a thing about modern high speed design > (mostly because I don't have experience in them). A good autorouter > could actually help pulling an LVDS or some restricted impedance line, > but then you enter anyway on the realm of 'every track is a trasmission > line which must be simulated anyway'. You will need bigger guns for that > stuff than eagle or kicad (and maybe even orcad). I hope to turn kicad into such a really big gun. I am working at adding features that display approximate calculations so that the board can at least be worth simulating and cut down the layout/simulation loop. --brian _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
