Historically, there have been two approaches to the use of computers for the design of printed circuit boards: Computer Aided Design (CAD) wherein a designer carries out the design of the board and a computer, coupled with graphics hardware (usually a storage tube) and software is used to carry out graphic handling and bookkeeping tasks; and Design Automation (DA) wherein a sophisticated placement and routing program, usually installed on a large computer, is used in a batch process mode to carry out the design according to necessarily limited algorithms. When either of these approaches is used in conjunction with dense PCB designs, the results have been unsatisfactory: From CAD because of a feeling that "the computer should be able to help me more in solving this knotty problem"; and from DA because the results of the automated process are usually so poor as to approach being worthless: that is, the effort to complete the design approaches the level of difficulty of designing the card manually from the beginning. The use of a computer-based design system for the design of dense printed circuit boards (PCB's) has thus been an elusive goal.
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/the-design-of-a-dense-pcb-using-an-interactive-da-system-g05W1v8eX8