Low cost PCB layout software

From: Ralph Malph (noone_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/23/03 

Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 14:50:35 -0500

I am looking for low cost PCB layout software. My designs are not
overly complex, and are on small boards, but I will be using very small
parts and features ~0.4mm/0.016" pitch, .006"/.006" trace/space. I have
looked at a couple of web sites that list free software and have found
two types of packages; the no strings attached open source packages that
are not very mature or run on xNIX (and not windows) or the PCB fab
house supplied packages that tie you to getting your boards from them.

Clearly I need something that actually works, so most of the truely free
packages are not viable. The PCB package from
http://bach.ece.jhu.edu/~haceaton/pcb/ seems to work, but is not
supported under windows. It is not clear if it will run under Cygwin.
I guess I could dedicate a machine to PCB design and run Linix, but I am
pretty sure I would end up creating problems from my lack of experience
with *NIX.

I looked at a few of the PCB vendor packages and have done one design
and ordered boards. It was fairly low risk since it only cost $59
including shipping from expressPCB. But these boards have no soldermask
or silk screen. I can live without silk screen, but the solder mask is
important when using fine pitch parts. In general, I am not happy being
tied to a vendor and having to duplicate the layout work to use a
different vendor. Reentering a schematic is no big deal, but layout is
very time intensive and each tool is toally different.

So that brings us to the commercial layout packages. Most of them are
several kilobucks and out of my budget. I found a list at
http://www.olimex.com/pcb/dtools.html of a lot of packages, but there is
no real info on them. So that is why I am here. Can I ask for opinions
on what tools will give the best benifit for the cost of the low end
tools? I hate to spend even $100 on a tool that I am not sure I will
want to continue to use, but if I have confidence that it will be a good
tool, I would not mind paying $500.

So what are my options and how good are they for fine pitch work, up to
6 layers?

And does anyone have any experience with TCI3? It seems to be a free
tool, but when I follow the link, the page is in French. Anyone know if
the tool can be used by English speakers (and readers)? Any English
docs? I guess I could learn metric dimensions; 0.15 trace - 0.15 space
:).

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