The autorouter will run forever if you let it; it continually tries to find an even better routing solution than the best one it has found so far. If a long time has passed without any updates, you can assume it's not going to get any better and safely click the "Exit" button to stop the autorouter.

The autorouter generates only data about how the board should be routed. It does not actually "place" the routes.

To "place" the routes and generate the other data that's needed to represent a complete board, you need to use the "Handroute" tool. When you start the Handroute tool after finishing autorouting, it will ask you for some parameters it needs, then it will show you the board with the routes in place. Within Handroute, you should at a minimum check that all the routes are ok and run a design rule check (DRC).

So, the basic order in which you use tools is:

1. SchEdit
2. PCBEdit
3. Autoroute
4. Handroute
5. PCB Print

Once you get comfortable with this basic workflow, you can begin to learn about how you can move back and forth if you need to.

Hope this helps,
-M

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To: winqcad_group@yahoogroups.com
From: wijono@...
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:13:31 +0000
Subject: [winqcad_group] Autorouter and PcbPlot