Hello everybody, of late I have been involved in technical training where am in charge of the printed circuit board design. I have been taking student through this process and sometime due to shortage of time, I always like to do the process of routing in a faster way. I have always searched on KICAD on an autorouting function without success and hence I am always forced to use an external software to make this successful but my worry is the the process of export-import files between the software is also time consuming. Does KICAD support autorouting by itself?
I do not know how much experience you have had with what kind of designs or boards. I have been engineering since 1975 and have been doing power since 1980. Power is not the only specialty for which good layout is the hidden secret sauce. You can have two different pcb layouts which both accurately reflect the same schematic, but one works well and the other is garbage. I had a board done completely by a layout designer (I was many thousands of miles away) and in spite of having no netlist errors it did not work AT ALL. Zero functionality. So I have serious doubt about autorouting. I do not know if it works well for any sort of design? I know it is practically useless for power.
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KiCad does not have a built-in auto router, as others have also already mentioned.
PCB design is much more than just letting an auto router make connections, and there are many considerations to be made and weighed against each other to come to a good design.
Even if KiCad had a good built in autorouter, it is not a good place to start for students.
Before an autorouter can be used effectively you have to know what you’re doing and how to weigh the many aspects of PCB design, and students do not have that experience. They also will not learn that experience by using an autorouter. Getting the footprint placement, GND zones and tracks right for even a simple design easily takes a few hours, even when using an autorouter (Just getting to a decent footprint layout is often much more important than the routing itself.
You write:
If starting an external program for the routing is “too time consuming”, then I wonder how much effort you put into the footprint placement and PCB design itself.
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thank you for the highlight. i wont concentrate on such threads
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