Well, DesignCon is a week away and I am filling in my dance card with meetings and classes I want to attend. I’ll be blogging from the show next week with observations and pithy comment on what I learn. If you have questions you’d like me to ask or comments you’d like me to pass along please respond here or send me an email at [email protected].
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That you are out there and that at least some of you are reading Laying It Out. I should have known that all it took was a little bit about software to get you to respond.
Seriously, I want to thank those of you who have sent a response and let you know that I will have my collaborator, Dr. Evil, working on a new database of layout software. The next week deadline may have been a bit optomistic, but Dr E. has been know to work some magic, so stay tuned and we’ll get the list on pcdandf.com as soon as possible.
In the meantime, feel free to comment as often as you wish. And don’t forget that Virtual PCB is coming up March 2-4th. Registration is free and you don’t need to travel or get a hotel room. Of course you can if you want, I’m just saying…
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That’s not an easy question to answer. Too much depends on the kind of design, what other tools you’ll be using and what level of design expertise the user has with other tools. But asking the question is a good way to find out about some of the products we don’t often hear about.

Traditionally tools such as PADs, OrCAD and Tango were the the choice for those looking for inexpensive layout tools. Today it’s not such an easy choice. All of these tools were acquired by other EDA companies and have evolved over the years to the point that they are not necessarily entry level tools they once were.

So I decided it is time to do an updated list of the PCB layout tools on the market today. I’m collecting data on as many layout tools as I can find and will post some basic information on the website next week sometime. In the mean time, here is a list of the layout tools I know about.

Let me know if I’m missing anyone and I’ll add them to the list.

Allegro – Cadence Design Systems
Altium – (formerly Tango, Protel, PCAD)
AutoTrax – Kovac Software
Board Station – Mentor Graphics
CADStar – Zuken
CR-5000 – Zuken
Electronics Workbench – National Instruments
Easy PCB – Pulsonix?
Expedition – Mentor*
McCAD – Mac based OS
Osmond PCB – Mac OS
OrCAD – Cadence/EMA
PADs – Mentor Graphics
Pantheon – Intercept
PCB123 – (Proprietary to Sunstone Circuits)
ProCAD – Interactive CAD Systems
Ultiboard – National Instruments
WinQCA – Microcad

(Good catch, TraceRouter)

Next month I’ll be getting back into travel mode as the annual trade show/conference schedule gets underway. If it’s February, it’s time for DesignCon in Santa Clara. Years ago I made it a point to regularly attend DesignCon, but that was a time when one of my responsibilities was a magazine that focused on SOC technology. The technical program was primarily academia based and dealt with chip design and related technologies. But now I’m told that DesignCon is putting a new emphasis on PCB Design and I want to see for myself. I’ve reviewed the show catalogue and most of what I’ve seen is focused on a rather high level of design abstraction that the majority of designer’s never deal with, but we’ll see.
Hopefully I’ll get to see some of our readers and advertisers face-to-face and learn something in the process. If you are planning to be there, shoot me an email. Tell me what you are looking to take away from the event and we can compare notes later.
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A couple of months ago I saw a demo of BluePrint-PCB, a product from DownStream Technologies that is intended to address the documentation phase of pcb design and production. It took me back to days of trying to make a layout tool do everything and how we had to kludge stuff together to produce our documentation package. Before CAD we had to splice a copy of a drill plot into a drawing format. Even after CAD we were still asking the layout tool to do things it was not intended to do. Some folks used dxf and AutoCad, (some still do) but it was still not an automated process.
So after seeing a demo of BluePrint, I came away asking myself why people are still using tools intended to do layout and routing, to put together a complete documentation package. After all, it’s not just about a BOM and a drill drawing. It’s a stage of the process that often gets short shrift, but without proper documentation, done right, the job just isn’t complete, and the folks in fab, assembly and test are left to play a guessing game. And we all know that trying to figure out what is going on in a designer’s mind can be scary. So I decided to do an article for the February issue of PCD&F on engineering documentation.
This issue gets more and more complicated with the addition of enterprise systems such as MRP, ERP and PLC and I plan to address some of these issues in the article. If you have some input for the article or just want to comment to this blog, please do not hesitate to feed me your success or horror stories.
Until then, have a great holiday. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus or the Solstice, have a safe and happy time.
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Earlier this week I talked to a designer who works for one of the large set-top box manufacturers. While some of their designs are punch and crunch, single-sided phenolic boards, he told me that in some cases they have to “dumb down” their more complex designs to get prototypes made in North America. Either the technology is not available in the US or the costs are so prohibitive that it is becoming a real problem. At PCB West I heard Happy Holden talk about the U.S. losing ground in manufacturing technology. This makes me wonder if North America will soon lose out on the prototype market as well.

For solid reasons companies usually have their prototypes made close to home and then go off shore for production. Well, the whole logic behind prototypes is to test both the electrical and physical design. But if designers have to dumb down the prototype design and then rely on off shore manufacturers to produce the boards in current technology, then I see that as a real problem.

What about you? Where do you go to manufacture designs that require HDI or other technology centric fabrication?

Well the smoke has cleared and the dust has settled. Last week we held our first ever PCB event in Atlanta. PCB Atlanta was the latest in our series of one day, regional table top shows and I have to say that all of us were really happy the way things turned out. The show floor was busy most of the day, and the forty or so exhibitors all had positive things to say about the event.
In some ways it was like a reunion. I saw people I hadn’t seen in years and it was really good to catch up with folks and find out what they were working on.

We ran a series of free classes during the day of the show. Class topics ran the gamut, from social networking to power and signal integrity. Just about every class was packed and it is always a good feeling when people tell you that they learned something at one of our shows.

I have to admit it was good to attend a show and still sleep in my own bed. Right now we’re working on the schedule for next year and trying to decide where we’ll do the regional shows. If you have suggestions, respond to this blog and we’ll get a discussion going.
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