Re: gEDA-user: Driving the netlist from PCB (instead of gschem)

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 09:46 -0400, Rick Collins wrote:

> Personally, I favor the idea of a unified data base for both layout 
> and schematic.  So far no one seems to agree with this idea.  I 
> recently found out that IPC has a standard file format for layout 
> information.

IPC-2581?

It would be intersting to know how many manufacturers / CAD / CAM
vendors actually support that format.

Lack of existing support is no reason to be behind the times, but it
would be good to know if this is actually going to get used in the
industry or not. I've not heard of many board houses wanting ODB-X
instead of Gerber (for example), and ODB-X was a predecessor of this
standard.

If we're at a juncture in the future where we're considering designing
or adopting a new file-format, adopting something like this natively
would be a possibility - IFF it could serve all our requirements, and /
or be extended sufficiently. (XML formats have an advantage here).

If it is just about making this an optional export format, there is
probably no point coding anything until someone needs it, or has a
desperate desire to code that support.


If this format is suffieicently good at describing layouts without
loosing information, it may be that it meets resistance from vendors.
They don't seem to _want_ text-based output to contain enough
information to migrate between CAD vendors. Funny that.

I heard this is why ODB-X wasn't well adopted, possibly from someone on
this list.


-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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