Re: EDP Mod

[Chris Muir <cbm@well.com>]

At 12:39 PM -0700 5/25/99, Kim Flint wrote:
>PCB design is a bit of an artistic talent. Takes a certain type of
>creativity to visualize the best ways for all the traces to route around
>the board. On the complicated stuff I do these days, practically all of 
>the
>PCB gets hand routed (instead of autorouted). The layout designers we use
>do seem to be a bit arty, and have this great intuition for sorting a lot
>of it out in their mind as they go. I've heard many say it's a lot like
>doing a painting. It's all done on software programs, of course, but
>without the human involvement it's a disaster. the autorouters are no
>substitute...

Auto-routing works great for simple-to-medium digital boards. For boards 
with any sensitive analog stuff, forget it. For complex digital boards, 
they might get as far as 95% of the way with auto routing, before giving 
up and leaving the last 5% for humans. The problem here is that, by this 
time, the auto router has made such a mess of it that the last 5% is just 
plain impossible. The only thing left is to start from scratch with a 
human in the driver's seat, or for a human to peel back the auto routed 
design to about 50% done, and take it from there.

In this era of grand master chess programs, it's nice that there are still 
some things that we lowly humans can cling to to prove our superiority.

Chris 

____________________________________________________________
Chris Muir     |     cbm@well.com      |     got moloko?