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Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 11:29:07 -0900
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Subject: Re: [geda-user] The nature of gEDA users
From: "Britton Kerin (britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 10:53 AM, John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 26, 2016, at 11:04 AM, DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
>
>>
>>> In this day and age to say blind/buried vias are not needed is ridiculous.
>>> The fact is ANY design that requires even one FPGA, custom ASIC or
>>> medium to large BGA needs blind/buried vias.
>>>
>>> This is factual and is easy vetted.
>>
>> If you can afford a custom ASIC, you can afford a top-end EDA package,
>> and a FAB that supports high-end features.
>
> Not true. In my world, I have to do much of the EDA work in the the proposal and feasibility study phases. Shoestring budgets, or no budget at all. A big company covers this by having lots going at once, but Noqsi Aerospace is a tiny company (3 people at the moment, the largest we’ve ever been). For our current biggest project, we went through two years of doing a lot of work for zero pay (but now it’s paying off). We couldn’t have afforded a top-end package during those years. We worked with a board designer who used Osmond PCB: not high-end, but it has blind and buried vias. He was much faster and more accurate than the big-$$ contractors who use the high-end software.
>
>
>>  Frankly, PCB is not a
>> high-end package and custom ASIC users are not our target audience.
>
> But gschem can do schematic capture for ASIC even though that’s not its target. The difference is that gschem doesn’t limit what you can draw. It’s quirky and limits *how* you can express what you need, but I’ve never found it incapable of expressing a circuit. It gives you a few crude primitives and a few ways to compose more complex objects from simple objects. A few layers of that, and you have a 6000 component mixed-signal ASIC.
>
> Pcb says to the user “my way or the highway”. Gschem says “live with my quirks, and I’ll help you do anything”.

Not true, I've just gone through the entire format carefully and pcb
actually has very little per-part or per-feature overhead.  It's about
as close to a paint program as it can be.  It can do lots of stuff,
though admittedly often in quirky ways, just like gschem.  Your major
gripe seems to be that you can't "draw" 3D or inter-layer features,
because their implementation is bolted onto the fundamentally layer
oriented design in a hard-wired way.  It's a true complaint but not
very useful, because adding 3D CAD would require a total rewrite with
buckets of additional complexity.

It's completely possible to go on adding features like blind vias
without a total rewrite.

Britton