Re: Quad POKEY db

>This is something I have never done before, so how involved, and expensive
>is it to do a very small ( < 5 ) pcb run? I guess I am kinda directing
>this at Clay, as it seems he would have the most experience doing this.

How involved:
Depends. If the design is small (four chips and a plug) it's not bad at
all. You do have to know what you're doing though. PCB manufacturing has
its own lingo and issues. www.apcircuits.com (they're in Canada-- you'll
see that a lot NAFTA reasons) has a good "starter course" for picking up
the basics. That's pretty much how I learned (and I sat across the wall
 from our PCB guys for about a year).

It's pretty tedious the first time, and depending on the quality of your
tools it can be almost impossible depending on what you're trying to do.
For all the ESB stuff I used the free EasyTrax and GCpreview and it worked
fine. Took a while to get the board right with EasyTrax, and I still had
an "oops" on the Version 2.0 ESB boards because I got careless.

For the Sega Multigame I actually used OrCAD's "real" tools because I was
going from a schematic and I wanted the auto-router to do most of the PCB
work...

Expense:
Depends. You should be able to do 5 boards about 3x5" each for around $20
each. You pay based on some setup charges and square inches so it pays to
keep things small. If you wanted soldermask and silk screen on those it'd
be more like $80 a pop.

(That's not bad at all-- we'll spend upwards of $300-400 PER BOARD to do a
"professional" quality prototype ISA card. That includes electrical
testing and 8 mil track widths and track-to-track spacing though too...)

>And, if I could come up with the cash, could someone guide me through
>creating whatever I need to make the run?

www.apcircuits.com does a good job of that. Just quadruple check your
work-- you want to get it right the first time.

-Clay

(tip-- when you can, "piggy back" other projects on the same board and just
cut them apart with a Dremel or hack-saw. You save the big setup charges
that way. The Sega Multigame includes a little PCB to "jumper" the
Security Chip socket that I'll just cut off the fab prior to shipping...)

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Wed Nov 12 10:36:14 1997