Software For The Bbc Computer 3: Pcb Design

EE 56 February 1987 SOFTWARE FOR THE BBC COMPUTER 3: PCB DESIGN Third in the series, this article looks at designing printed circuit boards with the aid of an artwork production package. Pineapple Software of Ilford, Essex, are the suppliers of PCB, a software package intended to make high-quality artwork for the direct production of printed circuit boards (PCBs). The program comes as a sideway ROM, a disk, and a reference manual. In essence, PCB is a high-resolution draughting program, capable of outputting layouts to a draft quality printer. The maximum size of a circuit board that can be designed is 10 cm x 16 cm, being the stan- dard Eurocard format. PCB fully supports the making of double- sided boards, and uses differ- ent colours for the tracks on each side of the board. PCB is not an auto-routing program, which means that it can not automatically decide on the most efficient track route be- tween roundels. The user of PCB draws the track-layout on screen with the aid of th...