Hello fellow gEDA/PCB users, I hope this post is not too off-topic/inappropriate for this list. I have an open source hardware design (an SDSL hacking board) that's getting close to entering the layout phase, and I will soon need to hire someone to do the PCB layout. (I have to outsource it because it's a task well outside my skills range.)
Right now I'm just looking for a very rough guess order-of-magnitude estimate of how much this is going to cost me, so that I can tell whether I can foot that bill on my own or if I'll need to procure some sponsorship before this project can proceed. It's a totally non- commercial open source hardware design, I share the design freely with the world and I'll do the same with the PCB and Gerber files which I'll be paying someone to create, and if I do make and sell any physical hardware units, I'll sell them for the cost of production without any profit margin. If anyone here does PCB layouts for hire, I would appreciate it if you could take a quick look at my summary below and give me a rough approximate estimate of how much you would charge to do this layout. I would prefer for it to be done in PCB so that the resulting product will be in an open source format, but nonetheless my main overriding concern is cost, so in the admittedly unlikely case that person A offers to do it in PCB, person B offers to do it in some proprietary format and person B charges significantly less than person A, I'll have to go with person B - but again I think that scenario is very unlikely because I would imagine that those into proprietary tools are likely to be more commercially-minded, be less friendly to non-profit hobbyist open source projects and charge more. Summary of the board design that needs to be laid out: * Schematics: 10 B-size sheets; the circuit complexity should be roughly equal to that of an average DSL "modem" of the older generation that hasn't been shrunk down to one chip. * Estimated board size: I would like to fit it into a 130x165 mm 6 layer PCB if possible (again matching the average DSL "modem"). * No BGAs, 3 QFPs, the rest is mostly SOICs, TSOPs and SMT discretes, very few TH parts. * MC68302 microprocessor (QFP) with 20 address lines and 16 data lines wired, non-multiplexed; these buses need to go to two 8 bit wide SRAM chips, two 8 bit wide flash chips (covering the 16 bit wide data bus), the SDSL transceiver chip (only 8 address lines and 8 data lines) and an FPGA (13 address lines, all 16 data lines). * A lot of synchronous serial data and clock signals for the SDSL data path, including 4 muxes. * Mostly digital, but there is a small analog section between the SDSL transceiver chip and the jack. * No RF, the fastest signals would be the M68K bus which I may want to run at up to 25 MHz. Additional documentation: Project home page: http://ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG/OpenSDSL/ Schematics as they stand currently: http://ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG/OpenSDSL/OSDCU/OSDCU_schem.pdf http://ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG/OpenSDSL/OSDCU/OSDCU_schem.ps The design is done in uEDA, my own offshoot of gEDA which I'm in the process of polishing up for release. I don't expect the person hired to do the PCB layout to mess with uEDA, but I can export the netlist in the PCB format as well as a bundle of PCB elements for all components. Design spec (very detailed): http://ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG/OpenSDSL/OSDCU/hwdesign.txt That's all I have for now. I hope someone is willing to do the PCB layout for a price I can afford. :-) MS _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user