Re: Has anyone produced a board using Kicad?


Hal Murray wrote:
I haven't built any board with it, but I did work with it enough to
be sure I could use it if I needed to.

I think the key idea is that the auto-router is next to useless.
Are you prepared to hand route your whole board?

I still use an older version of PCB (050318) which is fast. And I do
hand route almost everything, as it's autorouter isn't up to a high end
($30K) router either. On the other hand, I also layout very dense
boards that even OrCad/Cadence chokes badly on too, so I've gotten used
to hand layout as required, rather than optional. I wish the gEDA
integration was as good as Kicad at times, but it's never been a severe
problem either.

I've turned several high density boards with PCB without problem that
are double sided smt, small form factor (PC104+) with BGA560 FPGA,
multiple TSOP2 SDRAMs, EEPROMs, Compact Flash, and speciality analog
audio, ISA/PCI -- several thousand connections in the 3.75" x 3.5" form
factor. I gave that boards flat netlist to another designer that was
unable to get OrCad to route it with the same placement (or any
placement). Took me a little over a week to hand layout with PCB, and
he spent that much with an unusable OrCad effort after given both a
working placement and netlist.

I've also done several 16" x 22" dense double sided 6-8 layer smt
layouts with PCB that have a couple hundred thousand connections, also
hand layout, that took a couple weeks. I again had one of those already
flat netlists handed to another OrCad guy, and it was unable to route
it either. Over the years, several clients have autorouted my (and
other engineers) designs, only to end up with useless mazes that are
unmaintainable, and difficult to debug due to signal integrity issues.
Autorouting is highly over rated for high speed digital design, using
dense smd packages.

Humans, with a little practice, still do MUCH better.

.