Really? So ignoring a basic physical reality like resistance that can be easily calculated with high-school level math is OK for multi-K$ CAD packages?
This is what I said, yes.
Garbage.
That's right, and it should be handled in the software automatically, thought out in advance by the software people. Why the hell am I doing this? What does CAD stand for again? Computer ASSISTED design? Looks like I'm assisting the computer!
This is 2009. Should I also thread the 9 track tape on the tape deck to generate the BOM?
CAD is a tool. You use it as best you can, with the skill that you provide. The more the process becomes automated, the less reason there is for you to be there, with a brain.
Board design software was developed by people with little practical experience at the task, as an off-shoot of more widely used mechanical design programs. This situation has not changed, to my knowledge.
I don't believe that the man-hour trade off was ever effectively evaluated during the switch from manual photo-plots to CAD-generated gerbers in some fairly common applications (like power conversion). The point where such an evaluation was practical is long since passed, however.
Man-hour consumption still does not seem to enter into the evaluation of current CAD GUI design 'improvements' or effect brand name market supremacy. Bigger and faster operating platforms are the traditional crutches introduced to address this. I understand that bugs may also sometimes be addressed, between revisions, if the specific CAD package actually survives. You're lucky if you can market skills developed with one package in areas where others dominate.
Keep learning - simple practicalities require it. Your no-connect via may work, but it may also be avoiding the basic design problem of providing a safe interface between power and signal circuits.
I think it enters into it, but the market tends to be somewhat stagnant due to the often thousands of man-hours that companies have invested in building part libraries. The prospect of re-training even a small handful of employees and converting libraries over to a new system (and buying that new system in the first place) is certainly in at least the 5-digit range, and possibly pushing
6 -- enough that many companies, with their "six month or less ROI" desires, won't consider changing horses.
My observation is that things are slowly improving -- the IPC has gained a lot of traction in the past handful of years in trying to nail down footprint standards and footprint naming conventions. Unfortunately, there's no universal standard for schematic symbol libraries nor schematics or PCB layouts themselves, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon. I'm told that in the mechanical engineering world there are a few more standards (including DXG/DWG, of course) that helps a lot... plus the superior tools tend to make drawing (or re-drawing) even detailed small parts such as screws relatively fast.
Indeed. Too many companies think they want to hire, e.g., someone who knows a certain programming language or who has experience with a certain schematic capture/PCB layout tool, when in actuality then should be wanting to hire someone who's a good programmer or a good PCB layout guy. After all, if you go to hire a carpenter, do you ask him whether he has a DeWalt or Makita drill? Granted, operating EDA software is rather more complex than operating a drill, but the idea still applies.
As others have pointed out, with something like a switching power supply the engineer generally needs to be closely involved with the layout guy anyway and should be doing his own "DRC" to make sure things like sense lines are routed rationally. Getting the EDA tool to help the engineer and/or layout guy is an added bonus...
Ummm... So, you write software? For CAD work? And, you have some way to automagically tell the software that, Hey, I connected this here net to a SENSE pin, so you should automagically know that it needs to be routed differently, but I want it to connect to the same net that I gave you different instructions on for all other considerations? But, the SOFTWARE is supposed to know this. Of course, on this other design, you have a sense pin that you DON'T want it to do this special connection on, but the SOFTWARE is supposed to read your mind, and NOT do it here.
That was always the fun thing in support. You get a user who has a requirement, and they always assumed that EVERYONE else thought it should be done the exact same way. In Allegro and Concept, there are often three to five different ways through the menus and right click trees to do the exact same thing. This is because they would just add the feature wherever the (influential) customer asked them to put it. They also had options menus where you could turn OFF half the features, because they screwed up someone else's flow if you had them on!
So, you have several options. First, you can manually route your sense track, manually giving it all the options you need such as width, no pattern connect, etc. Of, you can give it a separate netname, with the rules predefined. Or, you can give Rik a call, and see if there is some other good way to do this, since he is 'the man' when you are talking allegro!
That's called vendor lock-in, IMHO the very reason why EDIF fizzled. Consequently every CAD software that requires the purchase of some sort of service contract in order to maintain a legit license raises my hackles and I generally advise against it.
True. For a good engineer it doesn't take a lot to get used to some other CAD.
It all depends on how smart the engineer on the other side is. Next week I have to do exactly that. A noise-sensitive design with multiple switchers on there will become ready and then integrated into some other stuff and laid out at a client. Luckily the engineer at the client is very competent.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
That sounds excessive, but these days pretty much all software packages (including the OS itself) have at least a couple of ways to do the same thing.
I believe the way to do this is to try the minimize the different "default" means there are of executing any given option, but provide rich support for keyboard customization, macros/COM automation, etc. so that people who want to do things a bit differently have the hooks to do so. If you have influential customers calling up asking for this, either you point them to a consultant who can do the customization or else just do it internally but only send out the configuration file to them.
Heck, some companies like SAP make most of their money this way -- selling a "shell" of a program and then customization services to actually make it useful (or so they claim :-) ).
What's perhaps ironic is that most EDA tool vendors now spend substantial resources building import filters for "everyone else's formats," and of course the import process tends to be imperfect anyway. Except for the guys at the very top of the ladder, everyone would be better off if there were an industry standard and products had to compete moreso on their own features/usability than the ability to lock-in users.
But that's apparently not what they teach at business schools... and lock-in-style behavior has certainly been around for many decades now. (You can bet that GM would require "GM gasoline" in their cars if they thought they could actually get away with it!)
WestDev (the Pulsonix guys) took a turn for the worse a couple years ago now when they changed their policy from "you need an active maintenance contract to receive new versions (e.g., 4.5->5->5.1, etc.)" (OK, fine) to "you need an active maintenance contracto to download bug fixes/minor improvemnts within the same versoin (e.g., 5.1 build 3551, build 3554, build 3555, etc.)" I don't think there's any good reason for doing this other than trying to squeeze a few more nickels out of your customers -- the reason WestDev gave was the rather lame, "...we're changing our policies to be in-line with industry standards..." (Apparently their mothers never asked them if they'd jump off a bridge just because all their friends did...)
EDIF became a "standard" that was purposefully made incompatible with all products sold by the committee participants :-(
[snip]
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Business schools often don't have the foggiest clue about customer behavior, that customers aren't stupid.
... and they sure won't see me as a customer. Cadsoft does not require any of this. I hope they learn how important a schematic hierarchy is for their business (blissfully ignoring that for now) and then this CAD would be close to perfect, they'd have me for life.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Well, in Concept/Allegro, they have the SKILL scripting language, so often a feature is just a SKILL script attached to a menu choice or button. This can make for interesting QA testing, to be sure that you haven't broken some script with your new features... ;-)
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