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mnpebm , 06-28-2016, 07:33 AM

Greeting all,

Wonder if anyone has used ICD Stackup Planner from In Circuit Design?

If so, what do you think of it?

At what stage in the design process do you use it?

Looks like it works directly with Altium and can help create design rules once the stackup is defined.

Thanks,
Mike

mairomaster , 06-28-2016, 10:01 AM

I haven't used it but I checked a couple of videos now, to see what it does. If it was free I would have tried it, just to play around, but considering that it's paid I don't think it is worth it in my case.

I normally work on advanced boards and speak to my PCB manufacturer to agree on a particular stack. They prepare the stack and send it to me, so I don't need to bother with that. This way it both saves my time and I no I have a proper stack, with well calculated impedance, etc. I am also sure that it will be manufactureable, since the manufacturer provides it.
If I need to make a very simple board, I use some of the simple, pre-defined layer stacks of the manufacturer (normally the cheap manufacturers have a few default stacks which can't be customised).

I don't think that the ability to import rules is that useful as well, since you need to know how to do this manually anyway, it doesn't save a lot of time and you have better control by doing it manually.

That is my personal opinion, it could be useful for some people

robertferanec , 06-29-2016, 09:52 AM

I have not tried it, but I completely agree with @mairomaster - these are exactly the same worlds what I would wrote