HiWIRE II Electronic CAD Software

HiWIRE II's Standard Features

• Executive program features a menu-driven user interface for start-to-finish ease-of-use.
• The same editor is used to design your schematics and your PCB layouts.
• Component creation and modification is unmatched in speed and simplicity.
• PCB traces, and schematic wires and buses, may be curved or run at any angle.
• Use math symbols and international characters (8-bit) in labels.
• Autoplacement optimizes PCB footprint arrangement.
• Gridless, rip-up and reroute autorouter speeds layout completion.
• Variable inch and metric grids can be used in the same PCB drawing.
• Forward/back annotation speed up modifications.
• Stream-oriented programming language for manipulating drawings.
• Automatic generation of photoplotter data.
• Drill-tape and CNC mill-tape generation to aid board manufacturing.
• Import Gerber, ASCII drawing representations, and netlists from other popular CAD programs.
• Export DXF, Gerber, HPGL, PostScript, PCX, EDIF, ASCII, and netlists for many other CAD systems.
• Output to dot-matrix printers, pen plotters, HP and PostScript laserprinters, and photoplotters.

Version 2.2r0 Features

• Autoplacement has been added to HiWIRE II. Autoplacement consists of two separate functions: a footprint loader that can work from packaging information in your schematic, and a placement optimizer that improves routability by changing the location of footprints on your board. The footprint loader is included with the basic HiWIRE package (EDT); placement optimization is included with either autorouter (AR or ARX).
• Numerous mathematical symbols, Greek letters, and foreign characters can now be used in HiWIRE drawings. When using the standard English character set (code page 437), drawings can include mu (e.g., microfarad), omega (ohms), beta (transistor or amplifier gain), plus-or-minus, greater-than-or-equal, etc. HiWIRE also supports code pages for Multilingual Latin I (850), Slavic Latin II (852), Portugal (860), Canadian-French (863), Nordic (865), and Japanese (932, eight-bit characters only).
• For producing Gerber/CAM files, a new executive command automatically determines the number of signal layers in your design, and infers the existence of silkscreens, power-planes, drilling and milling information, and surface-mount components. It will automatically create the aperture file, plot all of the signal layers, silkscreens, power planes, solder masks, and solder-paste masks, create drill and CNC mill tapes, produce a README file, and convert the Gerber plots back to a HiWIRE drawing for checking.
• The high-resolution video drivers have been improved, making them both smaller and faster than previous versions of VGA.VDR, NEC400.VDR, and VESA800.VDR (now named VGA800.VDR).
• A new 1024x768 super-VGA driver, VGA1024.VDR, has been added. This driver will only work on some video cards that support super-VGA. In particular, the CRT monitor, video card, and BIOS must support 1024x768 resolution, 16 colors, the VEDA BIOS call for this mode, and a 128KB video map.
• Both CONFIG and EP now support two separate initialization strings for output devices. For printers like the HP LaserJet and the Canon Bubble Jet, this means HiWIRE can now form an initialization string that depends on both the desired resolution and the paper size. Several obscure bugs have been fixed in EP.
• An improved AutoCAD DXF format export script uses polylines to create traces with rounded endcaps and better round and oval pads.
• You can now produce netlists in all of the following formats: EDIF 2 0 0, FutureNet, HiWIRE II (flat), HiWIRE II (hierarchical), PADS-PCB, Protel, Schema, smARTWORK, Spice, Susie, and Tango. These additional formats may be useful when you use HiWIRE with other CAD systems.
• An additional borders library, BORDR1X.LIB, contains the same drawing borders as BORDERS.LIB, but scaled for use with PCB and generic drawings with a scale of 1 (actual size).
• Several new utilities written as DE scripts have been added, including:
  LL.D (counts the number of objects on each layer of a drawing),
  PL.D (converts pin labels from invisible to size 4 and back again to assist with manual PCB layout), and
  RMNETS.D (assists the creation and checking of multilayer PCBs by removing the +5 and gNd nets from a netlist).
• Several enhancements have been made to the DE interpreter, including the ability to set variables from the DOS command line and support for wildcard characters in file names.
• The Bill-of-Materials command now supports extracting a BOM from all schematics in the project, and can optionally produce a flat BOM from a hierarchical design.
• GERBIN now handles full-circle interpolation.

HiWIRE II Software Pricing

HiWIRE II	$995.00 US
Standard Autorouter for HiWIRE II	$1295.00 US
Extended Microsoft Windows autorouter for HiWIRE II	$1695.00 US
HiWIRE II and Standard autorouter package	$1995.00 US
HiWIRE II and Extended Microsoft Windows autorouter package	$2395.00 US
HiWIRE II electronic viewer package	$495.00 US

Substantial discounts are available for smARTWORK owners who purchase HiWIRE II, for educational users, and for multiple-installation sites. Contact Wintek for more details.