Things You Need To Know About Autorouting

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Things You Need To Know About Autorouting

Automation is the key for a PCB design for a standard and progressive circuit workflow. Automation is a powerful tool and is used by many companies to make the PCB Design faster. It is believed that it has a positive impact on the industry and improves the business productivity by ensuring faster design completion . Many companies that offer PCB design services find that incorporating the autorouters in the PCB design that too in a standard process helps to be beneficial for them to reduce the time. However, the incorporation of autorouters cannot solve all the design challenges and cannot be used in all PCB designs. Hence, in this blog, we will know the essential things you need to know about autorouting and where you can incorporate it in the designs.

Why Is It Challenging To Incorporate Autorouters?

An autorouter is something that an experienced designer does not want to incorporate in their design. It is because while using the Autorouter in the given EDA tool or software it conjures the image and automatically routes for your PCB design in accordance with compliance, right signal integrity, and design rules. However, this point-on-click automation often causes experienced engineers to look down on this tool because it fails to live upon its name. Thus, we can conclude that these autorouters are not highly regarded by the engineers and are not so useful in designing all the PCBs. 

In case, if you consider the latest AI-based autorouters in the given EDA tool, they attempt to make routes based on the past data that too within a constraint defined by the user. Still, these AI-based autorouters also fail to perform better than the random searched router or the deterministic ones.

Possible Workflow For Autorouters:

If you look at the various PCB layout processes, the engineers arrive at two options which are possible workflow for autorouters. They are,

  1. While there is a low net count and reasonable constraint, the autorouters work finely.
  2. The autorouter works finely in the constraints such as location ( via count, direction, layers, and many more) and trace design.

Steps Involved In Implementing A Successful Autorouters:

As autorouters are specific tool, they should be incorporated into the targeted components and net for effective PCB routing and layout. The following are the steps involved in implementing a successful autorouters. They are,

  1. Look for the nets which does not require length tuning, controlled impedance, or locations of specific routing 
  2. Make sure to complete the placement of the components and secure the ones that are important.
  3. Now start routing the ones length tuned-nets or the impedance controlled net at first and then go for layer specific or location nets.
  4. However, the remaining nets can be autoroute by separating them into smaller groups.
  5. In case the autorouter fails, route them manually individually or manually.

Hence, from the above points you might have understood that autorouter is a tool which is effective when selectively used for the right use case. Approach Sunstream for your PCB tool needs or PCB Design services requirements.  Being a leading channel partner for Cadence Design Systems we can equip you Allegro PCB Design software or OrCAD PCB Design tool as per your design needs.