Hi, all. I am that person... Balloon4's design and layout is (at least partly) my baby. I'd like to do it in open tools, and for that, gEDA seems to be the only game in town.
(Balloon4 is roughly credit card sized, and has a TI OMAP(3or4) SOC, Xilinx FPGA, power supplies, USB, Ethernet, camera, display interfaces - imagine a Beagle Board XM, with rather more stuff, in about half the space. There a few design challenges, other than the density - fast wide buses (DDR2/3 and others), balanced and impedance controlled USB and Ethernet lines, >Gbps MIPI buses, many power domains and planes. We need to be able to manufacture it reliably, in volume, and have it pass EMC standards. We don't have funds to do many aborted runs due to DRC oopses. We don't have time to burn. The project sponsor needs working boards.) Things in gEDA's favour: It exists, it works (in that people are generating boards), it's live and under active development and use. It's free. The autorouter is alleged to work. If I can usefully get other people to collaborate on the design, they don't need expensive tools. It would be great to have Balloon designed in open tools. (I'm a happy user of plenty of other open tools, and electronic design would be fine too. I'd be happy to chip in my Altium support money...) Things in Altium's favour: Momentum. I use it day in, day out. I can get stuff done in it, quickly and correctly, including boards of this complexity. I can import TI's Beagle or Panda reference designs and work from there. No need to generate schematic parts. PCB footprint generation is speedy, and has integrated 3D models. I also have large libraries of tried & tested components. (I do have a full Specctra autorouting license, but Altium's interactive router is my preferred layout scheme, on any but the most autorouter-friendly boards). >From a perspective of 'just getting it done and shipped', it's (to me) clearly going to be faster in Altium. I know the tools, I know the tools can do the job, and I can import the reference design. I've seen some reasonably complex boards done in gEDA - but have no idea how long they've taken. It's possible to do PCBs in MS-Paint or by cutting tape, given sufficient time, the tools just make things faster and less error-prone. So: Given the board spec, and the constraints, would _you_ say it's sane to use gEDA for this? I'd expect it to take 5-7 weeks end to end, in Altium, from spec to gerbers (with the usual level of spec revisions, datasheet reading, component unavailability, coffee drinking - or 3-4 weeks of uninterrupted work). Or should I fire up gEDA on something smaller and less visible first? Anyone want to hold my hand while I do it? Steve _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user