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October 2014 • The PCB Design Magazine 45 ing, pad entry and eliminating extra trace seg- ments. In reality, the time spent making these adjustments is comparatively insignificant in the context of routing the entire design. Each design- er has a slightly different idea about what condi- tions warrant these additional adjustments. It is our expectation that the sketch routing environ- ment will provide 99% of the desired quality and if that isn't good enough, we should feel free to continue with those OCD tendencies. Video Examples Board routing is something that can be ex- pressed much better in a video example than describing with text. Here is a short video that looks at PCB layout quality in terms of both ob- jective quality and the subjective quality, culmi- nating in efficient routing. Summary Sketch routing environments with interac- tive routing tools like plow and the sketch router, along with the powerful tuning capabilities, are all focused on providing both objective and sub- jective quality results. During the development of the sketch routing environment, considerable effort has been applied to ensure that the routing results have both the objective and subjective quality as seen with manual routing. Again, this enables the designer to get the desired results in a much faster time because of the attention to quality during the interactive process. The next article in this series describing sketch routing address routing performance. Don't miss it. PCBDESIGN Charles Pfeil is an engineering director in the Systems Design Division at Mentor Graphics. He was the original product archi- tect for Expedition PCB and an inventor of XtremePCB. Pfeil has been in the PCB industry for more than 40 years as a designer, owner of a service bureau, and as a marketing and engineering manager at racal-redac, aSI, Cadence, PaDS, and veri- Best. To contact Pfeil, click here. ThIS IS SkETCh ROUTING, PART 2: QUALITY continues Figure 3: Sketch router quality that matches manual routing. sketch routing