PCB is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

software suite for

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

(EDA) - for

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...

s (PCB) layout. It uses

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

for its GUI widgets.

History

PCB was first written by Thomas Nau for an

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

in 1990 and ported to UNIX and X11 in 1994. Initially PCB was not intended to be a professional layout system but as a tool for individuals to do small-scale development of hardware. The second release 1.2 introduced user menus. This made PCB easier to use and increased its popularity. Harry Eaton took over PCB development beginning with Release 1.5, although he contributed some code from Release 1.4.3. PCB includes a

topological autorouter In electronic design, wire routing, commonly called simply routing, is a step in the design of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and integrated circuits (ICs). It builds on a preceding step, called placement, which determines the location of each ...

named

Toporouter TopoR (''Topo''logical ''R''outer) is an EDA program developed and maintained by the Russian company Eremex. It is dedicated to laying out a printed circuit board (PCB). The current version is 6.3.17875 as of 2017-09-20. It features a powerful ...

, developed by Anthony Blake in a Google-funded

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project mentored by DJ Delorie in 2008. It is mostly based on an implementation of the algorithms described in Tal Dayan's 1997 PhD thesis, "Rubberband based topological router". This router has meanwhile been adapted for use with the open-source KiCad project as well. In 2013,

pcb-rnd pcb-rnd is a modular and compact (core under 60k SLOC, plugins at 100k SLOC) software application used for layout design of electrical circuits. Pcb-rnd is used professionally as well as in universities. Pre-built packages are available on mult ...

was forked from PCB.

Features

* Scalable fonts * Layer groups to keep signals together * Add on device drivers *

Gerber RS-274X The Gerber format is an open ASCII vector format for printed circuit board (PCB) designs. It is the de facto standard used by PCB industry software to describe the printed circuit board images: copper layers, solder mask, legend, drill data, e ...

and NC Drill output support * Centroid (X-Y) data output *

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

and

Encapsulated PostScript Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is a Document Structuring Convention (DSC) conforming PostScript document format usable as a graphics file format. The format was developed as early as 1987 by John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, the founders of Adobe, ...

output * Rats-nest generation from simple net lists * Automatic clearance around pins that pierce a polygon * Flags for

pins A pin is a device used for fastening objects or material together. Pin or PIN may also refer to: Computers and technology * Personal identification number (PIN), to access a secured system ** PIN pad, a PIN entry device * PIN, a former Dutch de ...

and vias * Groups of action commands can be undone by a single undo * Simple design rule checker (DRC) - checks for minimum spacing and overlap rules * Drawing directly on the silk layer * Viewable solder-mask layers and editing * Netlist window * Netlist entry by drawing rats * Auto router * Snap to pins and pads * Element files and libraries that can contain whole sub-layouts, metric grids * Up to 16 copper layer designs by default * Trace optimizer * Rats nest * Connectivity verification * Can interoperate with free schematic capture tools such as gEDA and

XCircuit XCircuit is a Unix/X11 and Windows program for drawing publication-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams and related figures and the production of circuit netlists through schematic capture. XCircuit regards circuits as inherently hierar ...

* GNU autoconf/automake based build system * PCB is Free Software

References

External links

pcb.geda-project.org/pcb-cvs/pcb.html

history of gEDA/PCB
Free electronic design automation software Electronic design automation software for Linux Electronic design automation software Engineering software that uses GTK Free software programmed in C {{free-software-stub

History

Features

See also

References

External links