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All the tools you need for professional level PCB design and layout

A brand new version of Easy-PC for Windows – the affordable printed circuit board design system that integrates schematic capture and PCB layout with features normally found in the world’s most expensive PCB design systems – has just been released. Available from Adept Scientific, Easy-PC 10 is a major upgrade with a host of new productivity features that make board design faster and more intuitive, keep up with the latest developments in electronics design, and ensure your boards are easy to manufacture.

One of the most useful additions to this new version of Easy-PC is ‘hug mode’ routing. When you manually route tracks, they automatically ‘hug’ and follow the path of previously laid tracks as closely as possible, at the same time adhering to your design spacing rules. This makes it much easier and quicker to lay out single-sided or tightly packed boards where space is at a premium.

Easy-PC 10 introduces advanced blind (top to inner layer) and buried (inner to inner layer) via technology, so that you can define drilling spans and optimise the use of space in dense designs. A new Layer Stack Preview can be used in conjunction with this new technology to provide a cross-section visualisation of the PCB showing and naming the full layer stack and all via spans defined for the PCB design. This ensures you have visual confirmation of the manufacturability of the design before being actually made.

A new, optional Intelligent Gerber Import add-on lets you reverse engineer Gerber data from any original source and rebuild them in the Easy-PC design format. Using the intelligence within this new option you can build and use parts, fully rebuild track paths with vias and layer changes and regain full component placement. You can even reverse engineer the PCB back into an original schematic.

Easy-PC’s Footprint Wizard has been significantly enhanced in this new version. For example, you can now automatically add teardrop fillets to all pad connections on a track path in your design, or to selected tracks. This reduces the chance of mechanical cracking of the track at the point it enters the pad/via due to thermal shock, solder joint stresses and board loading in high stress applications; and also greatly aids solder direction during the automatic wave flow soldering process.

The Footprint Wizard adds a number of new devices, such as Axial, SON and QFN footprint, and a new graphical representation of the device similar to the way it appears on the manufacturer’s datasheet. This means you can create your new footprint quickly and accurately by transferring the device specifications directly to the appropriate dimension boxes in the wizard.

There’s a new, customisable Drill Table option that lets you specify whether normal, throughhole, blind and buried or non-plated through vias are tabulated in the design. Each type is displayed in its own dynamic table, and drill symbols specified.

RF designers will welcome the ability to create and add spiral tracks and shapes to designs and easily define the spiral parameters. Easy-PC 10 also allows multiple items (pads, vias, components) to be added; for example, multiple vias can be added to a net and then used to staple GND to a copper area.

Other new features include copper shapes in PCB footprints, enhanced copper pour, finish markers to show legal landing sites, striped tracks to highlight full path, spacing clearance display during routing and a range of new pad shapes including rounded rectangle which provides a better platform when using lead-free soldering techniques under the new ROHS directive.

Dynamic text callouts, design tooltips, multi-line text, editable dimensions, enhanced printing and many other usability enhancements help make Easy-PC 10 a must-have upgrade for existing users and a serious competitor to highly-priced PCB design software.

Also available from Adept Scientific are Easy-PC compatible autorouting and SPICE simulation options; tools for circuit synthesis, electromagnetic simulation and RF analysis; a tool to generate IDF data for mechanical and 3D CAD systems; parts and symbol libraries; and a new library of 1500 microcontrollers and microprocessors.

Upgrades to Easy-PC 10 from earlier versions and other products in the Easy-PC range may be purchased online from www.adeptstore.com; or email easypc@adeptscience.co.uk. Full details of Easy-PC and contact information for all Adept Scientific international offices are available at www.adeptscience.com.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.