PCB Layout / Autorouter software

EasyPC

Leon

Two that come to mind in the FOSS realm, Kicad and gEDA. Kicad has native Windows, Mac, and Linux versions; gEDA has Mac and Linux.

Bad auto-routers are worse than none, and most routers are bad. We do

John

I hope you can indeed live without the auto-router. From my experience, there is no real auto-router out there. I route my boards manually using Protel-DXP.

Pere

The Electra autorouter option available with Pulsonix and some other packages does a pretty good job. I don't use it much, though.

Leon

gEDA runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix.

Roger that. I was fooled by the statement: "gEDA is a set of GNU/Linux or Unix-native programs. There is no supported Windows version."

Not even a little bit of auto-routing? I use the auto router for ideas and then route it my way. Kinda like having help from Egor from Frankenstein. I get the brains but it may not be the right one.

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada

We usually pre-plan the placement and fpga pinouts so that things flow nicely, with minimum crossovers. For critical stuff, like precision analog or picosecond things, an engineer will do the placement and connections for one channel or whatever, and give that to our layout guy as a model. Placement is 70% of the battle. We also give him a design with FPGA or ram pins unassigned, and let him use the ones that route best. I think people are still best with mixed-signal or really high-speed stuff.

I've never tried a really high-end, like $50K, autorouter. They may make sense in extreme situations, like a sea of digital parts.

Heck, routing is the fun part.

John

I agree, Electra was not bad (I say "was" since I am no longer able to use the activation code due to finally dumping my windows installation).

I use manual routing generally, but is was nice to use when I had to route a board with SDRAM+flash+32 bit CPU. I was able to try out variations on part positions without creating a days work each time I moved something!

...but doesn't run on a Mac!

Rich Webb wrote:

Stuart (and others) have done a good job of cleaning up the Wikipedia entry for gEDA:

The *Windoze* part clears things up nicely and the OS X part is quite pithy.

I agree. I will take a preliminary placement layout and throw the autorouter at it. It can quickly show where bottlenecks and chokepoints are that i might not have noticed. Then I push things around, rotate parts or change pin assignments and route it myself manually/interactively.

Bob

I think so too. A lot of people don't like it, but I find it relaxing. I'll put on some instrumental music in my headphones and wander around the board allowing my left and right brain to play together nicely for a change.

Bob

Yup. I can listen to the radio, even newesey stuff, and route traces. I can't write code that way. PCB routing seems to use only a specific part of the brain.

John

I've really enjoyed pin-to-pin one-wire interactive autorouters, where you tell the computer "run a wire from here to here ."

Since you've placed the parts already--and maybe even boxed in the path with other traces--they get it pretty close to right. Then you can tweak it. A big timesaver.

Cheers, James Arthur

Interactive routers with a dynamic plow functionality are invaluable. You get the best of both worlds. You just push the trace as you go along with the mouse and it will reroute all traces within a pretty large vicinity to allow you to come through with your new trace. This allows you to use your brain to figure out the best topology, while letting the computer go brute-force to find a way. If the board is choked, you will see this easily as the plower will fail.

Routing complex memories and 32-bit CPU busses from BGA's is something you do in 1-2 hours with such a router. You don't need any autorouter and you definitely will lose time anyway on it since you have to set up the rules very well (this is the hardest part with autorouting).

/Bjorn

I dunno.. I find it disturbing when I close my eyes and I still see the board.. :P

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada

AFAIK an autorouter is the only software I use that behaves the most like artificial intelligence. If I have something acting like a primitive AI, then might as well treat it like a baby. It needs training, monitoring and if it misbehaves, some discipline.

D from BC myrealaddress(at)comic(dot)com British Columbia Canada