Converting Mentor PADS to PADS ASCII

[joule]

Hello friends

I found this really cool TI reference design, but it's *ancient*

https://www.ti.com/tool/TIDM-BIDIR-400-12

I have PADS .pcb and .sch files for the design, but they are BIN and not ASCII so I can't open them in a modern program.

Does anyone have a version of PADS installed that could export these as ASCII files?

-j0ule

[Doctorandus_P]

I had a quick look at the .pdf of the PCB and it looks fairly simple.
KiCad can create a PCB project from a set of gerber files, and although the conversion is not perfect (a lot of info is missing in gerber files), it's still a lot better then a full manual re-creation.

There is a quite nice tutorial for doing this on the KiCad forum:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/reverse-engineering-kicad-project-from-gerber-files/30903

I assume other EDA programs can do something similar and something in that direction seems your best option if you can't manage to do a direct conversion.

[m.abdelwanis]

In case you still need it, I exported it for you into ASCII, DXF, or ODB++ format.