I don't think that's true. Perhaps by number of PCBs made 2 and 4 layers dominate: all those IoT doohickeys and alarm clock displays. And even single layer phenolic boards. And for most hobbyist work with little MCUs, 4 layers is a sweet spot. But they're usually either very simple devices where routing is not the problem, or they have very tight application constraints where the placement has to be squeezed and squeezed.
But much of the effort in designing PCBs in industry is on 6+ layers. You can probably smash out a simple smart lightswitch PCB in a day. Boards with BGA SoCs, DDR, PCIe and FPGAs can take whole teams months or more and have incredibly complicated constraints, many of which are implicit (the very simplest: put cap near pin, test points inline, make diff pair via symmetrical, keep this SMPS far from sensitive things, and make the inductor loop as tiny as you can). There are a million ways to make a PCB pass DRC and still be a completely non-functional device. In particular, routing is secondary in terms of effort and importance to placement.
If you sample what a random PCB engineer is working on, it's quite likely to be lots of layers, or an extremely tight layout, and probably both. Or something weird and application-dependent like high voltage. And they're probably fiddling with placement at the random sample time you choose.
Toy examples of sparse layouts like mechanical keyboards and DIP ICs are very unrepresentative of where the real effort, and money, goes.
KiCAD must be moving up in the world if people are using it for 6-layer boards. Or Altium, at US$5,500/year, is now too expensive even for pros.
I'd thought of KiCAD as a hobbyist tool. It didn't have the intensive library support of a pro tool. Footprints and 3D models were user submissions and not well curated or tested.
Footprints might need some manual tweaking.
With a pro tool, you're paying for a small army of people doing data entry on part info. Has KiCAD improved in that area?
KiCAD must be moving up in the world if people are using it for 6-layer boards.
With every release of KiCad, the difference between KiCad and Altium gets smaller and smaller.
With a pro tool, you're paying for a small army of people doing data entry on part info.
That has never been my experience using any PCB tool (even the truly big boys like Expedition or Allegro). Any libraries managed by an entity external to the people designing PCB boards have always been a disaster. If you haven't personally put something on a board, it is, practically by definition, broken.
Anyone using a "pro" tool (Expedition or Allegro) has their own army of people managing their library.
I could rant yet again about how Altium screwed themselves by encrypting libraries so that you had to subscribe to them, but I'm tired of that rant.
In Altium's stead, KiCad has been eating up the bottom end more and more. There are still some missing features (copper on inner footprint layers, flex board stackups), but they get fewer and fewer with each release. And Autodesk's moves with Eagle have hastened even more people onto KiCad.
People 100% use KiCad for 6+ layers. My most recent design has 6 and KiCad didn't break a sweat. There's a 12-layer CERN design that ships with KiCad as a demo, even.
No tool has libraries that never need tweaking for a design. 99% of KiCad library parts will never need touching in a usual "simple" design, but no one library part can cover all eventualities. Any tool that promises a library that doesn't ever need to be touched is lying or naive. You should also always check footprints wherever they come from, even if you paid for them.
KiCad has a new library team, and the parts in the library are revolutionarily better then they were say, 5 years ago.
Comments
I don't think that's true. Perhaps by number of PCBs made 2 and 4 layers dominate: all those IoT doohickeys and alarm clock displays. And even single layer phenolic boards. And for most hobbyist work with little MCUs, 4 layers is a sweet spot. But they're usually either very simple devices where routing is not the problem, or they have very tight application constraints where the placement has to be squeezed and squeezed.
But much of the effort in designing PCBs in industry is on 6+ layers. You can probably smash out a simple smart lightswitch PCB in a day. Boards with BGA SoCs, DDR, PCIe and FPGAs can take whole teams months or more and have incredibly complicated constraints, many of which are implicit (the very simplest: put cap near pin, test points inline, make diff pair via symmetrical, keep this SMPS far from sensitive things, and make the inductor loop as tiny as you can). There are a million ways to make a PCB pass DRC and still be a completely non-functional device. In particular, routing is secondary in terms of effort and importance to placement.
If you sample what a random PCB engineer is working on, it's quite likely to be lots of layers, or an extremely tight layout, and probably both. Or something weird and application-dependent like high voltage. And they're probably fiddling with placement at the random sample time you choose.
Toy examples of sparse layouts like mechanical keyboards and DIP ICs are very unrepresentative of where the real effort, and money, goes.
KiCAD must be moving up in the world if people are using it for 6-layer boards. Or Altium, at US$5,500/year, is now too expensive even for pros.
I'd thought of KiCAD as a hobbyist tool. It didn't have the intensive library support of a pro tool. Footprints and 3D models were user submissions and not well curated or tested. Footprints might need some manual tweaking. With a pro tool, you're paying for a small army of people doing data entry on part info. Has KiCAD improved in that area?
With every release of KiCad, the difference between KiCad and Altium gets smaller and smaller.
That has never been my experience using any PCB tool (even the truly big boys like Expedition or Allegro). Any libraries managed by an entity external to the people designing PCB boards have always been a disaster. If you haven't personally put something on a board, it is, practically by definition, broken.
Anyone using a "pro" tool (Expedition or Allegro) has their own army of people managing their library.
I could rant yet again about how Altium screwed themselves by encrypting libraries so that you had to subscribe to them, but I'm tired of that rant.
In Altium's stead, KiCad has been eating up the bottom end more and more. There are still some missing features (copper on inner footprint layers, flex board stackups), but they get fewer and fewer with each release. And Autodesk's moves with Eagle have hastened even more people onto KiCad.
People 100% use KiCad for 6+ layers. My most recent design has 6 and KiCad didn't break a sweat. There's a 12-layer CERN design that ships with KiCad as a demo, even.
No tool has libraries that never need tweaking for a design. 99% of KiCad library parts will never need touching in a usual "simple" design, but no one library part can cover all eventualities. Any tool that promises a library that doesn't ever need to be touched is lying or naive. You should also always check footprints wherever they come from, even if you paid for them.
KiCad has a new library team, and the parts in the library are revolutionarily better then they were say, 5 years ago.