RE: PCB Design Software?

[ian.bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Maybe it is because the Proteus is a little wanting in their standard
autorouter that they went to the Electra autorouter. The standard one is
still there but as Keith says rather poor. For Electra the down side is it
is 350 quid + VAT for a single user 2 signal layer license that is node
locked to a single machine. For that money I would want something pretty
impressive. Maybe I should try the evaluation version some time ;-)

On the other side it can take me weeks to manually place and wire the
boards I am designing now and I would buy it if it would help with this.
These are the statistics from my biggest board so far:

Objects 213
Pins 871
Vias 252
Holes 352
Traces 1047
Trace length 1003.55mm
Nets 194

all this packed into a 6 by 4 inch board makes for a complicated placing
and routing task. An autorouter with rip up and retry and some brains
would be a godsend.

Ian







>I have tried the autorouter on several occasions an I do not like the
results one bit. I probably havent >studied it in depth enough to have a
bit
more control over it but I simply dont like the way it routed
> the tracks.

On that one Eagle comes out very well - it's autorouter does a pretty
reasonable job, and lets you take a few attempts at a circuit, so you can
rip up any tracks you dislike, route them manually, then re-run the
router..

I have managed a couple of *insane* boards - packed a PIC, glue components
and a CAT5 socket into a doorbell housing: the autorouter did a sterling
job.

Ian.








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