Re: Would you be interested...?

>Clay, as far as the autorouter setup, I only use it on larger boards with
>lots of logic and little analog. Once you read the book, set and save the
>autorouter settings, you can recall the settings and re-use them, so setup
>is a cinch. If the autorouter is set well, it looks almost like I layed it
>out by hand. I always go back and touch up the layout afterwards anyway.

Cool. It's entirely possible that PADS is significantly better than OrCAD
Layout Plus too. OrCAD has really high completion success when I use it,
but it makes a real freaking rats-nest in the process.

Actually, I bet 99% of the problem is that I only give it two layers to work
in. It has real problems cleanly routing busses and power distribution-- in
order to get good power distribution I can give higher priority to the power
nets, but then it really hoses up all the routing channels left on the board
for everything else. Letting it do everything *before* power results in
really crappy power routing. If it had a power and ground plane to work
with it'd probably do much better. (All the examples are at least 4 layers
I see...)

We actually hand-route everything we do for work. We're always trying to
get by with the bare minimum number of layers, and without any shielding to
save weight/cost/space. The layout guys and hardware engineers are pretty
incredible here though-- our Rio 600 is a 75MHz ARM, five different
clocks/crystals, a multi-100KHz switching power supply, a 200V EL backlight
generator, and lots of ports for noise to get out(USB, serial, audio,
power), and it *still* passes FCC Part 15 by several dB with 4 layers and a
plastic case (no spray or shielding!).

(Sorry if this is drifting a little off topic, things have been so quiet
here lately I hope it doesn't matter. Neil can yell at us if we're being
annoying. ;-)

-Clay
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Received on Mon Jun 26 18:16:59 2000