PostHeaderIcon Which method is better for PCB Layout, manually or automatically?

If we choose to use auto layout, till which level it can support? Such as how many layer it can be? What frequency it can achieve?

All the PCB designers I have ever encountered prefer to choose layout PCB manually, because they say the auto-layout don’t have good result compare with layout manually. From my point of view, IC layout is more difficult and complicate than PCB layout, but why IC layout can use auto-layout nor PCB?

Precisely speaking, no matter auto-layout or manual-layout, there should be a principle ahead, that is: rule driven. Those designers who claim that auto-layout is not good because most of the rules are still embedded in their mind, and haven’t yet integrate into the design, so the auto-layout won’t achieve their requirement.

Frankly speaking, the rule set up for auto-layout can’t be achieve 100%, so after PCB Layout finish, we still need to modify it manually.

So there is a balance among here, if the time you spend on integrate the rule into software has already longer than the time have been taken for PCB layout manually, it is not necessary to make auto-layout.

So few designers auto-layout high frequency, because almost every line of high frequency PCB has restriction, so if we need to add rule to each network, there surely more time we need to spend than manually layout.

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