Homepage   Forum     WEB     BBS  
Thread List  
Forum Guide Map  
Thread Content             
 Homepage  >> RFEDA FORUM  >> PCB
   
share your opinions on autorouters?
Author ai8957382   Views 25   Posted at 2008/8/27 11:06  [View In Forum]
can someone share their experience with autorouters, like Specctra or others.bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
Is an autorouter like specctra reliable for routing a whole board or does it require interactive editting, and how much interactivity is required?bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
bzlwf
- Jayson
      

Reply No. Replier Total Replies 30   [View All Replies]  [New Reply] Replied at
1 knoxville I use PowerPCB to do placement and divided the ground and power plane, then I set the design rules for clearance, at last I convert it to specctra to route, all of wires are routed in specctra except the clock signals, becaue the arc wire in PowerPCB will be changed to acute angle.





I wonder whether it is necessary to set design rules by language in specctra.
2008/8/27 11:06
2 ybyygu do you autoroute in Speccta or do you use interactive routing?





- Jayson
2008/8/27 11:06
3 stgod If you want good result route manually your pcb. 2008/8/27 11:06
4 bubulu I Guys





I have routed boards for many years now . But just small boards .No big deal up to 6 layers .. I well know from experience that sometimes is better to route it by hand .. But it has always been a curiosity for me HOW those HI DENSITY PC MOTHERBOARDS are ROUTED? .. Doing it by hand will seem like to TAKE YEARS !





Any body knows??
2008/8/27 11:06
5 zunwang I reccommend all of the sensitive/high speed signals on your board by hand and letting the autorouter do the rest. Also, I noticed cheap autorouters (like the ones built into P*otel and orcad) tend to work better on boards with <4 layers (like most hobby projects) than expensive ones (like specctra) do.





eternal_nan
2008/8/27 11:06
6 ken7976 i use power pcb for the placement and design rules


routing i preffer spectra, but not auto routing manual routing in spectra is very effective than routing the board in the power pcb, and it can be fast too .


binu
2008/8/27 11:06
7 netlgc Autorouters will only do what you tell them. These beasts are 100% rules driven. The time is in the rules definition as regardless of what it says on the box, some rules regarding grids or 'channels' will conflict with other rules such as grid settings vs trace width settings, clearance, net length matching, diff pairs, clock from toos & termination and so on.





Sometimes the time to set up the rules is more than the time to route manually especially if you have a lot of mixed analogue/digital rules to follow and use split planes.





If you use software for capture that will translate all PCB rules defined at SCH level to be followed by router then you will save time. P*otel does not do this, or at least does not allow for proper rules definition in SCH yet with enough parameters to work on a dense design.





For a mid range router, well integrated into the tool suite Pads is pretty hard to beat with Blaze.





Specctra is really cool but I have not seen it work well with other tools, based on quality of rules translation and interactivity level, outside of Cadence suites. But no suprise there of course





The Specctra interface is where most non-cadence tools fall down, but I beleive PCAD works very well with it as they used Specctra for many years anyway.





All down to time, and in some cases available CPU time & lots of RAM!





Howver most routers can help in routing some of the sh#t work like fanout, memory arrays or reptative routing and so on. Even the cheap built in ones do this OK most of the time.





As regard PC motherboards routing, the last project I was involved with long time ago was a team effort and they used Specctra, based on a Pentium Pro CPU, the time allocated for defining and optimising the rules, of which most can be obtained from most vendors or associated standrads anyway, was 6 months!





Cheaper to buy a mobo these days





:R
2008/8/27 11:06
8 stgod What you guys suggest for single layer small PCBs with jumpers? 2008/8/27 11:06
9 pdang I am in process of routing double sided 160mm x 100 mm board with usb contoroler, dsp, ram, two din96 connectors and some other chips and connectors. OrCad smartroute almost finished it with 3 conflicts. The "best" router specctra left 18 unconnects behind and even "better" autoactive leaves 35. Blaze manage to route to 5 opens after running half night long on 450Mhz computer. 2008/8/27 11:06
10 ct731 Despite what margeting people says, i have found autorouters behaving poorly. Especially when you are routing mixed-signal pcb. There has been couple occasion when autorouter has routed clock signal over analog groundplate. Though the problem might be in a user. But anyway i think you get better pcb when you route them by hand. 2008/8/27 11:06
 Total Replies 30  Thread Per Page 10
Page 1/3  |<  <<   1 2 3   >>  >| 
Power by rfeda