Does anyone have any rule tips for creating a decent Protel autoroute? I have used the autorouter before with a couple designs and it did great. I have a pretty complex board now and the routing is crap. The worst culprit is that it runs two parallel traces for the same net, like it doesnt optimize and consolidate properly. This happens a lot. It even places two same net vias overlapping. I fixed the overlapped via, but I dont know what to do about the traces.
Does anyone have a decent set of design rules they would like to share?
Caffeine:
I gave up on the autorouter and manually route everything. Looks much neater…
I just finished routing a board with a tqfp64, compact flash, GPS, accelerometer and USB. The autorouter couldn’t even do it with 2 layers.
Got any tips or tutorials for manual routing. My board is 3.5 by 1.6 and it has a TSOP32, TSOP28, QFN28, VQFP64, QFP32, USB and a bunch of support. Its tight, but it does autoroute after a long while.
Best thing to do is try and keep the top layer traces going one direction and the bottom layer orthogonal. It is usually awkward to route the first few traces since you want to just connect it directly, but in the end, its much better to keep each layer separate.
Also, I find it best to turn off routing of the ground nets. I save the ground for last and create a ground plane on the bottom (and sometimes the top).
I think that the most important part for good routing is component placement. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any advice other than practice.