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by seveibar
447 days ago
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Hey cushychicken! Would love to see what you’re working on and thanks for explaining (seveibar at tscircuit dot com is my email if you want to set something up!) I do think humans need to be in the loop on autorouters, but I also think autorouters should be very fast and decent. In web design we progressively add constraints (via CSS) to tweak the output of the visual design and see the result instantly, I believe this same workflow is possible for PCB design (and will favor those good at specifying constraints!) |
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I don’t think the goals of “human in the loop” and “fast and decent” are mutually exclusive, or really even at odds with each other.
I just think that most autorouters I’ve tried seem to have been written by CS people who thought PCB layout was an interesting problem to solve - without a particularly deep understanding of what working EEs care about in terms of how you route the board.
Case in point: plenty of autorouters seem to work on the paradigm of “all tracks routed? Great. I’m done.” Never mind that everything is two layers of spaghetti: no ground plane, no power planes, no regard for SI or EMC compliance. In other words: pure hell to test and certify.
Not trying to be crotchety EE by saying this - I can give a good example of what I mean in real time. I also feel like I’m a bit of the exception in the EE community in that I think this is a solvable problem. I just don’t think many CS people have really bothered to consult any real working EEs about their workflows and the downstream portion of test and certification.