It's not a limitation at all. There are no PCB design programs that have every part ever manufactured in the library. At some point you're going to have to make a PCB footprint yourself no matter what software you use. Pretty much all datasheets have explicit measurements of the footprint layout. Even better if you have the physical part and some calipers.
Has there ever been an attempt at a good standardized machine-readable exchange format for datasheets in general, btw? Feels to me like it still all comes down to authoring tools for making pretty PDFs, and while there's something to be said for the universality of a good ol' paper-style doc made for human eyeballs, but it's also silly (not to mention error-prone) for Engineer A to use a SW package to make a schematic for a datasheet PDF, and Engineer B then reading it and inputting it back into a SW package.
I assume many vendors also offer parts libs/files in EDA formats, but are those proprietary or is there any de-facto standard like Gerber files?
It'd also be nice to browse datasheets' other contents in a consistent interface right in the EDA or in a web app instead of dealing with a zoo of PDFs in vendor-specific styles.
Maybe it's this kind of thing we'll automate using LLMs/models ... give it a description of the scripting API of the EDA, give it the PDF, make it map a footprint from one to the other. Or to a standard format. For back catalogs that could be useful ...
>I assume many vendors also offer parts libs/files in EDA formats, but are those proprietary or is there any de-facto standard like Gerber files?
It would be great if part manufacturers would just make the footprint files and 3D files available for the parts, because I have no doubt that in 99% of cases the manufacturer has those files somewhere. I've tried to social engineer this out of some companies with very little success. I don't care what format they come in, I'll get it sorted out. I have collected an arsenal of file format conversion tools.
>Maybe it's this kind of thing we'll automate using LLMs/models
I have no doubt that at some point in the future you'll just give the AI the PDF and it will spit out a PCB footprint in any file format you want. We're not close to that though.
