When designing PCB's, I find myself very often having to make footprints for a significant portion of the components on my board. This tends to be very time-consuming, as (in Altium at least), dimensioning out land patterns for strange connectors or chips (those that can't be created from a wizard) isn't very easy. It seems like anyone that uses these chips or connectors would need a footprint, so I can't understand why these aren't more commonly provided. For example, right now I'm trying to put a USB 3.0 Micro-B connector on a board, but the top 5 connectors on Digikey don't seem to provide footprints. I have access to the Altium Live design content, but even that seems often pretty out-of-date.
I feel like there's something obvious that I'm missing – or else this system seems very inefficient (which usually isn't the case). Can someone enlighten me?
Best Answer
You've discovered the dirty little secret of the EDA industry: Thousands of engineers everywhere reinvent the wheel every day - they all create many of their sch symbols & pcb footprints from scratch. It is quite ridiculous.
However there are reasons for it, in particular no universal (or even common) file format (nor for the schematics & PCB designs either), and that's in large part the fault of the various EDA software developers, who rely on this lack of file format compatibility to keep customers locked in.
Until recently there's also never been a way to have confidence in 'random' other people's sch/PCB-footprint designs, so E.E.s err on the side of caution and make most of them themselves. But now there are some options, like snapeda.com and circuithub.com.