Talked to the OrCad guy here. He asked if it was an artifiact of GCPreview.
He also said it would be fairly easy to change the component library and
correct the drawing. He also noticed that the BGAs looked funny. Are they
pads all the same size on a component by component basis?
Do you have the OrCad files? We would look at them for you but I bet you
have a non-disclosure issue.

What about the solder stencile? What about the solder mask, do the big pads
end up SMD? That would be bad for sure.

 -----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Steve Gregory
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 2:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] PCB lay-out problem...


  Hi all,

  We're having a board lay-out done outside, and as with new designs, I will
get asked to look at the preliminary gerbers to see if I can see anything
out of place that might need changing.

  I looked the the gerbers that were given to me and the first think I
noticed was that on some IC footprints, there was 1 rectangular pad, then 9
pads where the corners were rounded, then a rectangular pad, and on and
on...

  So I fed that back to our engineer here who is over this project, then he
fed that back to the individual who is doing the lay-out. Our engineer here
then came back to me and asked if that would be a problem, and I told him it
could be, but why not make all the pads uniform? Go to:
http://www.stevezeva.homestead.com and look at "OrCad" to see what I mean.

  His reply was that the individual doing the layout told him he would have
to go in and manually edit each one of the pads that were rectangular, and
that it would be too much trouble. He said this is the way OrCad put the
footprint down, and if it was such a problem, why would OrCad have this
footprint in the library? Then he added that the IPC-SM-782 says that you
can either use rectangular pads or optionally round the corners, so that
tells him you can use either one or both, and it doesn't make any
difference. So he told the layout person to leave things as they are.

  I don't know anything at all about OrCad, but something tells me there's
an operator problem here. I've never seen a footprint like this before, and
no matter what I say, I can't convince our engineer here that the footprint
needs to be fixed.

  HELP!!! PLEASE!!!

  Thanks,

  -Steve Gregory-