Not true. Have you ever seen designs made by Cr5000 or ESD or Vanguard ? Those tools have special abilities you will not find in cadence/mentor/altium. Vanguard allows (allowed. that tool dates back to 1988 on the first 386 computers running under a proprietary operating system (it wasn't dos, but was a standard compaq 386 pc) you to stitch wire jumpers directly in the pcb without impacting netlist. The jumpers were exported in the pick and place data. I used that software at Nokia. Was made by Teradyne ). These tools have distinctive looks in their layout. You can immediately tell by looking at a pcb : that's made with that particular tool ( font type , style of trace termination , offset holes in pads (this was before teardropping) . ESD ran on solaris and was made to do hybrid design ( printed resistors and capacitors on ceramic substrate with naked silicon and bondwires . or BGA substrates. That too has special functionality not found in your average pcb design tool. Chip on board or chip on flex with pillars or bondwires. Here you need to be able to export bonding coordinates.) Many TV's in europe (Barco, Loewe, ITT) were designed on intergraph workstations using Clipper processors (all proprietary stuff) .Hi,
The "look" is just cheap asian production style.
It can be done with almost any PCB layout software.
One could setup the autorouter parameters to generate just "linear jumer"... then optimize them manually.
The output may be post processed to get the "jumper data".
This is not my style. My PCB layouts are not that cost critical, mainly high reliable industrial design.
Klaus
ok, you clearly do not understand my question.Hi,
If you say so...
When someone asks me to work with those tools I feel drawn back some decades.
Nowadays we have all the HF around: cellular phone, WiFi, Bluetooth....
It will be hard to make a EMI/EMC compatible PCB layout with one side copper and those jumper wires.
40 years, it maybe was good standard.
I did not say one find the exact tools in a modern PCB software.
But still one can do it with the modern tools.
Klaus
Hi,ok, you clearly do not understand my question.
It is not about high speed 24 layer boards with blind and buried via's.
True, but that does not preclude the usage of single layer boards. Go take a look at consumer products. many are using single layer boards. Take apart a microwave, refrigerator, lcd tv, 5.1 amplifier , you will find many single sided boards, all designed in the last 6 months. all using the techniques i described.Hi,
I did not write about designing a 24 layer board with blind and buried vias...
So please stay polite.
And surely I did understand your question.
What you don't understand is: It does not matter what board you design, even if it is a single layer low frequency board, with or without digital part, it needs to fulfill HF EMI/EMC standards. Simply because nowadays it is very likely that there is a HF source (cellular phone, etc ) nearby.
This is what I wrote.
Klaus
I did not say so.True, but that does not preclude the usage of single layer boards. Go take a look at consumer products. many are using single layer boards
I know.. but then mass produced products are penny pinching like anything. And they have to be. A couple of years ago i was called to the customer in Singapore to help solve an EMC problem (near field) with one of our devices (i used to design silicon for harddisks) . I solved it by 'tuning' the capacitors on the power rail so that they would form the lowest impedance on the frequency that was causing trouble. The design was above limit in a pretty narrow band, so i picked a couple of values that would dampen that band.I did not say so.
I said "It's hard" and this is how I meant it.
With other discussions about PCB layout - especially for unexperienced members - I say that it's easier to create a "EMI/EMC good" PCB layout as 4 layer than with 2 layers. For a good 2 layer PCB you need more experience.
And for sure the companies you talk about - they have experience. And they include the metal case into consideration. They know how to go to the limits.
A couple of years ago I was at an EMI/EMC test house with one of my designs.
The result was that my design (switch mode power supply, about 10W) was about 40 dB below the limit (bare PCB, no shielding).
I asked about the result of other companies' design. He told me that he just had tested a comparable SMPS of a big international SMPS manufacturer. It was just 3dB below the limits although it hat a metal case. I'm sure they know what they do... just to fulfill the regulations with lowest part cost.
Klaus
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