Stats

  • Replies 8
  • Subscribers 25
  • Views 14745
  • Members are here 0
More Content

Skill code to Calculating PCB Real-estate usage using placement boundaries and package keep ins

Toolman

Other tools allow a sanity check of placement density vs available board space.  There is an older post "Skill code to evaluate all components area (Accumulative Place bound area)"  (9 years ago) that has a couple of examples that no longer work or expired.

This would be useful to provide feedback to schismatic and project managers regarding the component density on the PCB and how it will affect the routing abilities.  Thermal considerations can be evaluated as well 

Has anyone attempted this or still being done externally in spread sheets?

Parents
  • jgregoire

    I have not tried doing this in SKILL, but as a Linux user, I came up with another solution.

    1. Quickplace all parts
    2. In color dialog, hide everything except the PLACEBOUND shapes.
    3. Select all visible shapes, run Show Element. Save the output as a text file. Buried in this huge report is an area measurement of every shape. You wouldn't want to add these manually, but that's what shell scripting is for!
    4. Run this command in a Unix environment: $ grep -w Area shape_area.txt | sed 's/.* \(0\.[0-9]*\) .*/\1/' | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'
    5. Compare the resulting area number to the area of the PLACE_KEEPIN box.

    Works in Linux, Cygwin, git-bash, WSL, whatever you have available to you.

Reply
  • jgregoire

    I have not tried doing this in SKILL, but as a Linux user, I came up with another solution.

    1. Quickplace all parts
    2. In color dialog, hide everything except the PLACEBOUND shapes.
    3. Select all visible shapes, run Show Element. Save the output as a text file. Buried in this huge report is an area measurement of every shape. You wouldn't want to add these manually, but that's what shell scripting is for!
    4. Run this command in a Unix environment: $ grep -w Area shape_area.txt | sed 's/.* \(0\.[0-9]*\) .*/\1/' | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'
    5. Compare the resulting area number to the area of the PLACE_KEEPIN box.

    Works in Linux, Cygwin, git-bash, WSL, whatever you have available to you.

Children
No Data
Cadence Guidelines

Community Guidelines

The Cadence Design Communities support Cadence users and technologists interacting to exchange ideas, news, technical information, and best practices to solve problems and get the most from Cadence technology. The community is open to everyone, and to provide the most value, we require participants to follow our Community Guidelines that facilitate a quality exchange of ideas and information. By accessing, contributing, using or downloading any materials from the site, you agree to be bound by the full Community Guidelines.