Free/Open Source PCB autorouter in development; help wanted

People are still getting papers out of it:

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Thanks!

cheers, Jamie

Back in the days of multiple parallel buses with lots of devices on each bus, running fairly slowly, there was a need for a really good auto-router. I have used the best (supposedly) and ultimately came up with my first rule of board design.

All auto-routers are crap, although some are less crap than others.

Simple boards can be auto-routed by pressing go on the cheapest auto- routers, complex boards take ages, you spend nearly as long driving them as you would have spent hand routing and they always cost you at least 2 extra layers.

I'm about to put a board through layout with three big FPGAs, about 40 Gigabytes of DDR3 on about 9 banks, a DSP, 10 Gigabit ethernet and a couple of the latest and greatest ARMs. We have an unlimited CAD budget and the autorouter is licensed but we won't use it. We will have several contractors using mentors ability to have multiple users working on the same database.

On the other hand the latest mentor cad system has excellent push and shove with clever undo and very good length matching and all sorts of other useful similar stuff which is fantastic for routing the sorts of boards that the industry now makes. Any effort to open source this sort of thing would be very welcome. Kicad and similar software is still not hand routing friendly, at least not as friendly as my 15 year old copy of ORCAD (which has lots of other faults, but the hand routing look and feel isn't one of them).

Colin

What are the academic requirements of a "layout guy" anyway?

My kid does our PCB design, and she's very good and very fast. She went to Cornell, and majored in softball and beer pong.

John

John Lark>My kid does our PCB design, and she's very good and very fast.

What was her minor and with what other companies did she interview?

For us? Dunno. He isn't an engineer (electrical, anyway) but has a lot of years experience with several other companies (including contracting for himself).

Interesting, but the best three layout people that I've known were all women, with no electronics education as such.

John

I don't find that too surprising; the artsy vs. logical thing. You've also mentioned before that you've not seen one female design engineer. Besides, sometimes the layouter needs to ask for directions. ;-)

There isn't much in the way of academic requirements. I use a Russian PhD, and an locally grown art student.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Psychology. Come to think of it, she never interviewed anywhere else.

She used to work summers in production, which is great education for laying out boards. All lay-outers should assemble boards first.

John

Or like some of us who had to fix that shit in the local TV repair shop during high school. Learned REAL quick how to design for service.

Jim

Last time I tried to fix a TV the difficulty wasn't layout (actually the failure was *caused* by layout) but the damn plastic case. Take off the back, and the bottom came off with it. How are you supposed to fix a TV when it can't stop falling over?

Duct tape.