Are you aware of what TopoR can do? And yes, for 1/2 layer routing it seems to work fine when fed from Kicad.
For relatively insensitive signals, or when you can constrain the layout with rough guidance to something that should easily pass signal integrity, this technology makes it so you can go get lunch while the computer gets a decent layout that you'd typically check before sending it off to the prototype fab or get started on quickly running one in-house (for that <2h turn-around from layout to power-on, including printing and soldering).
Yeah TopoR is really impressive. The thing is, I don't find that the hard problem is just the routing -- it's the combination of the placement and the routing. I find that I place with some idea of how I want to do the routing. I really haven't met any professional PCB designers that use the autorouter. I can see how it might have been useful several decades ago with low speed designs that had massive memory busses. Like if you were routing an arcade machine board or something. But now? Signal integrity is very important and everything is serial.
If I need something more complex very quickly, I usually do some combination of hot gluing and cutting up dev boards and dead-bugging.
Comments
Are you aware of what TopoR can do? And yes, for 1/2 layer routing it seems to work fine when fed from Kicad.
For relatively insensitive signals, or when you can constrain the layout with rough guidance to something that should easily pass signal integrity, this technology makes it so you can go get lunch while the computer gets a decent layout that you'd typically check before sending it off to the prototype fab or get started on quickly running one in-house (for that <2h turn-around from layout to power-on, including printing and soldering).
Yeah TopoR is really impressive. The thing is, I don't find that the hard problem is just the routing -- it's the combination of the placement and the routing. I find that I place with some idea of how I want to do the routing. I really haven't met any professional PCB designers that use the autorouter. I can see how it might have been useful several decades ago with low speed designs that had massive memory busses. Like if you were routing an arcade machine board or something. But now? Signal integrity is very important and everything is serial.
If I need something more complex very quickly, I usually do some combination of hot gluing and cutting up dev boards and dead-bugging.