Design Without Restrictions

If you design printed circuit boards, or you would like to, Osmond PCB for Macintosh puts great power and flexibility within your reach. Artificial limits and restrictions are banished. You can now design boards of any size and shape and with as many layers as you want. With a spatial resolution of 10 nanometers (0.00001 mm), Osmond gives you all the precision you need. You can place parts anywhere on the board with any orientation. You can also run traces of any width along any path and at any angle.

Flexible Features

At times you may wish to work in Metric units. At other times, Imperial units may be prefered. Osmond supports both. You can even work with both Metric and Imperial units on the same design, seamlessly switching from one to the other to suit your needs.

If you bring a design from a schematic capture application, Osmond will import the part list and net list and maintain adherence to specified design rules thoughout the design process. However, you can also start with no part lists or no net lists at all and generate the design in a completely informal, ad-hoc manner. Osmond supports your design style, whatever it may be.

Of course, Osmond provides tools that let you move and re-orient parts, connect and route traces, modify existing traces, and edit pads and pad-stacks. But you can also make your traces curved and make PCB labels using characters from the Mac font library.

Osmond provides a flexible grid to help guide your work. But you can also import any PDF document to serve as a background image. This can be especially handy if you need to match your design to an existing mechanical drawing or if you need to partially retrace an existing design.

Integrated into Osmond is a Parts Editor that lets you easily define new part types or modify existing part types. Both thru-hole and surface mount part types are supported as well as round, oval, and rectangular pad shapes.

Osmond supports ground or signal planes using several methods, and also allows you to define arbitrary copper flood areas.

In addition to the signal layers, Osmond provides two silkscreen layers, two solder mask layers, and multiple auxiliary layers that you can use, for example, to show dimensions or special fabrication notes.

To further enhance your design capability, Osmond provides scripting support, using the very powerful Lua programming language.

Finishes

Osmond has tools that let you check that your design is free from error and that it meets all your specified design rules.

Once your design is complete, Osmond can produce standard Gerber (RS-274X) files and Excellon drill files that fabricators use to make your boards. If you desire more control over the fabrication process, Osmond will also let you define your own panels containing either multiple copies of your design or several different designs. Do-it-yourself fabricators may prefer Osmond's Postscript output, which can be directly printed on transparencies that can then be used to etch the PC board.