gEDA-user: LVS and other pcb related questions

[Anthony Shanks <yamazakir2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I have some questions about pcb.

1. I have the concept down of how pcb interacts with the components
you place on the board and the netlist you load and I have them
working properly, as I can properly highlight nets and components with
the netlist browser. However, from what I can tell, there still isn't
any concept of lvs in pcb, or am I missing that? Of course you can
manually highlight and check every net as a manual type of lvs, but is
there no automatic tool for this? If not, is there at least a way to
make sure that your netlist and pcb have exactly the same number of
components with the proper refdes indicated in your netlist (as in,
there are no missing components, duplicate components, or misnamed
components)?

2. I looked at the way pcb instantiates a component into the drawing
area and it looks like instead of just referencing the footprint (as
gschem does with symbols), it actually just copies the contents of the
footprint file to the pcb, so if you edit the footprint it doesn't get
updated. I can see why some might like this, as editing a footprint
doesn't break the layout, but is there an option to just reference the
footprint instead for people who want this? For example, if I have 100
footprints of 0805's and I want to change the mask clearance for all
of these footprints it would seem as if I would have to do this one by
one.

3. Right now, I am running gnetlist -g PCB on my schematics to
generate the pcb netlist file. The problem is I have multiple
schematics that I am generating a netlist from and I am manually
appending the refdes to indicate which schematic the netlist comes
from so all my refdes will be unqiue. (for example, instead of U1, it
will be U1.A1). Has anybody developed some kind of script or flow to
solve this problem? I would like to get away from doing this manually
eventually.

4. Why doesn't pcb play nice with pins that aren't numerical? For
example, if I have a netlist that references U1-vcc, and a pin named
as U1-vcc, pcb will complain and won't highlight the pin/net. What
property of the symbol in gschem is gnetlist using to determine what
the pin number is?


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