Disclaimer - I'm the software guy, no the hardware guy)
Quick Deatils
- Board is 11" x 11"
- Contains two large BGA-like pad arrays, each with 364 pins
- Contains ~580 parts
- Board has 4217 connections
I've got quite the drama unfolding over here.
- We hired a contractor to do schematic capture and routing.
- He did the schematic and was into about 5 days of routing when he suggested to add two more layers to try to speed up the routing
- After adding the layers there was virtually no change
- We decided to move to another, more experienced contractor who also was going to make some vital circuit changes
- He made some additional schematic changes FAST and got right to routing
- After 2 days, the route job is still only at 93% (been there for about 12 hours now)
- He also asked for two more layers (now we're up to 8) and to drop the trace to .05mil
- It's STILL crawling
- I thought that eagle may be CPU/memory bound so I brought the most power Amazon EC2 Windows instance online (64GB ram and 26 compute units (30+ Ghz CPU power))
- I was shocked to see that Eagle only used one core and barely any ram and continued to drag along at an agonizing pace
At this point I'm getting desparate. We have a HARD deadline coming up and if I don't come up with some gerber files in 3-4 days my project will be a disaster and could quite literally destroy my business. I'm not being dramatic, it really could deal a death blow if we don't have this project ready for a trade show that's coming up.
So I wanted to ask the community here what ideas you may have for me? A couple questions I have:
- Does the linux version of eagle utilize multiple cores/CPUs?
- Is the linux version native 64bit so it can use those 64GB of ram?
- Are the really expensive applications (OrCad) able to route circles around Eagle? Should I jump my eagle ship and seek out a contractor with a higher-end toolset?
- If yes to #3, can the *.sch and *.brd files be imported into OrCad?
Please help.
-Steve
