The IEEE Spectrum has an article about making circuit board prototypes. The fellow used CadSoft’s Eagle, now owned by Newark, and an outfit called BatchPCB for the board. The reason the board is so cheap is that you are only buying one board in a panel. It also looks like BatchPCB provides a marketplace for people selling their little boards. Batch PCB is a spin-off of Sparkfun, a site that sells kits and parts to hobbyists. Nothing wrong with that, that’s how Digi-Key got its start, after all.
Now I evaluated Eagle about 5 years ago and had some trouble pouring copper planes for analog boards. It could do it, its just that Eagle is a cross-platform EDA tool that I suspect comes from the UNIX programmers. It sure seemed arcane to place and then edit a copper pour. On the other hand Altium worked just the way I wanted-a straightforward menu choice to place the outline and you double-click on the pour to edit anything about it, including the layer. My primary experience is with the old Orcad Layout package, but Cadence has obsoleted that, and I find Orcad Editor too hard to learn- it is just a stripped down Allegro. Its powerful, yes, but you better be using it every day if you want to remember its command structure. It too comes from that UNIX CAD mentality, where you first say what you are going to do and then pick things. I kept inadvertently deleting items since I would forget it was in a “mode”. My pals say that verb-noun methodology comes from the command line days, where the parser had to find out what you wanted to do first, and then you could pick things. You can write macros to do all the wonderful things Orcad Layout did, like erase all the layers when you press backspace and show the layers as you hit the 1, 2, 3 keys. You can also program the I and O keys to zoom about cursor like Orcad Layout. I programmed that into Altium as well, but I can see holding down the <ctrl> key and scroll-wheeling is pretty good, and it’s a Windows standard.
If you like free, and who doesn’t, you should check out PCB123, from Sunstone. You have to use Sunstone’s fab service unless you pay them 30 or 40 bucks for the Gerbers, but using PCB123 for free is a pretty good option. I like to have ownership and control of the design files so I have been learning Altium. Their 3-D design has everybody else playing catch-up this year. I have also used and liked Mentor Graphics’ PADS, at least in the old days, and I have a buddy that loves Pulsonix, since he gets personal help just for asking.
As to the board houses, well I have used the big three, Proto-Express here in Sunnyvale, Advanced Circuits out in Colorado and Sunstone up in Oregon. A friend has really good luck with PCB Pool in the UK. They are giving you a free solder-paste stencil with your board. My friend’s deal was that he needed a lot of tiny round boards and PCB Pool only charged for the board area. All the routing was free. It may take a bit longer to ship from the UK, but their pricing and service both seem to be great. I understand the BatchPCB mentality about only buying one board, but I suspect most engineers are fine with getting three boards or whatever minimums there are. Last time I checked, which was years ago, Proto-Express could get you three four-layer boards for about $150. Advanced Circuits has a free online DFM that some folks really like, but Nolan Johnson over at Sunstone makes a good point when he says that their rules systems finds problems before you make the Gerbers, not after. In addition to working with PCB123, you can import the Sunstone rules to Altium and PADS and a couple other packages.
I know Proto-Express did not let you panelize a bunch of identical tiny boards on one, at least a few years ago, so PCBPool was better for that. All the American companies have assembly houses they work with and Proto-Epress works with a Chinese vendor if you want to go into high-volume production. The Chinese vendor is able to do everything Proto-Express does, which is remarkable,. Sicne Proto-Express will do 25-ounce copper and 4 mil traces, as well as blind and buried vias and microvias. You won’t get any of those technologies for the same price as the No-Touch boards, but it is nice to have the ability. I also see a lot of designs where the ground plane is 8-mils under the outer layers, so a 50-ohm trace is not as wide as when here is 20 mils of dielectric under it.
You should check out all the PCB fabricators. Sunstone is doing something exciting by partnering with Digi-Key, NXP, National Instruments and board assembler Screaming Circuits to offer a circuit design ECOsystem, and the double entendre for ECO as engineering change order is intentional. These folks are working on putting Digi-Key pricing inside PCB123 and National Instruments’ Electronic Workbench PCB tool, MultiSim. And don’t discount PCB123 just because it is free. It is designed by Keith Akermann, who worked at PADs and Massteck and a bunch of other CAD companies. His dad, Al Akermann founded Massteck, the great layout program Orcad bought to replace their first attempt. It is MassTeck that became Orcad Layout, and I have a couple friends who are dismayed that Cadence just killed it.
