Personally, I think the PCB and stencil above is prettier with the green showing through. It breaks up all of the boring silver color. It adds some life in …
… Unless you are a chip wanting to be soldered down. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t look so attractive.
Whomever really, truly and universally solves the library problem should get a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer. Maybe a free latte. Something tells me the problem won’t be solved in my lifetime, though.
It really shouldn’t be that difficult. How many different package form-factors are there? Yes, a lot, but a manageable lot. The problem comes in when you have to match those footprints to the millions of schematic symbols. Maybe there could be a way to decouple the specific footprint from the schematic symbol.
The schematic could have its pins defined to an abstraction layer and then that abstraction layer could be automatically connected by the layout CAD software pin to pin on the specific footprint selected. Maybe. We can dream, can’t we?
Duane Benson
I’m happy I live in a split-level head