Re: Would you be interested...?

>what s/w cad tools do you use? I'm looking at some tools to do a Lunar
>Lander "clone" but I can't find a package for less than $1000 that'll do
>the
>job.

I use OrCAD Capture and OrCAD Layout Plus. I'm sure both are well over $1K
each now-a-days, although I think there's a free-webbased version of OrCAD
Capture now. I got 'em cheap a while ago when we bought a whole bunch of
seats at work. (When I last checked on the UPGRADE price for my Layout Plus
to go to the latest version I think it was like $1800!)

At work we use OrCAD Capture for schematics and PADS 2000 for board layout.
Also multi-$K dollars...

There are a fair amount of cheap schematic/layout programs out there, but
for any "real" project, it really pays to have "real" tools. (So you can
cross-probe schematics/nets, enforce design rules, have auto route shove and
completion, DFM, etc.)

I must admit that even though OrCAD's autorouter is quite good (for an
autorouter) I don't use it anymore. For the size boards I do I can route it
by hand faster and better than it would take me to properly constrain the
autorouter to get similar results.

I think there's a really old DOS-based version of PADS out there for free
now. I used it for the first SW/ESB boards. Having never seen anything
else I was none-the-wiser to its shortcomings. ;-) You could probably do
most anything in two layers with most any capture/layout tool, it's just a
matter of how much time you'll have to put in to get the results you
need/want.

The MultiJAMMA main board (which is really pretty low complexity compared to
a full game board) is about 50 components, 700 drill hits, and around 100
nets. I had about 22 hours of routing time in on it. Since a single FPGA
or something now-a-days can have more nets than that whole board, if you're
using "modern" stuff (fine-pitch surface mount, 0603 and smaller discretes)
you'll want a real tool. If you can hack by with some DIPs and PLCC's you
can use less sophisticated stuff, but rip-and-redo can take a LOT of time.

(Oh, while I'm at it-- if anyone wants to e-mail me please use
cowgill@home.com and NOT clay@yahoo.com. My yahoo account seems to be
cross-linked to two separate databases and is pretty-well totally screwed.)

-Clay
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Received on Sun Jun 25 00:24:58 2000