Pinswapping

[Jessie Vogt]

Does anyone know how to set pins in Viewdraw to be swappable? I have a bunch of BGA's on my design and we're trying to optimized the pin to pin layout the best we can - for a better route when we send it into the autorouter.

Layout tool : PowerPCB
Autorouter: Specctra

[Lameris]

I would guess you are designing using FPGA's. Mentor has released a new product to make pin swapping easier, although there are some complaints about it from the users of the program.
http://www.mentor.com/fpga_boardlink/

From the online help I have posted the PINSWAP attribute instructions below. BUT... you may also need to look at creating a viewdraw pin file to map pin names to the pin numbers for mapping in PowerPCB. PowerPCB really knows only of pin numbers. Alpha numerics are an add on...


From DxDesigner help:
Using the PINSWAP Attribute With PowerPCB


Specifying Individual Pins

With PADS, you can specify individual pins that can be swapped using the PINSWAP attribute with the following syntax:

PINSWAP=(A,B,C, ... )

where A, B, C, etc. can all be swapped with each other.

You can also use the syntax:

(A,B),(C,D), ...

where A can be swapped with B, C can be swapped with D, etc.

You cannot, however, specify discrete groups of pins to swap with other discrete groups of pins. If you attempt to do this by using square brackets, The DxDesigner PCB Interface ignores all pin swap information.