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Hello,
I am working on a project including multi-channel design. I am using Altium 16.1.9. Each channel is fairly complex - over 500 components, fine pitch devices, micro and buried vias, many nets, polygons, etc. The final board will consist of 16 such channels + other blocks (it will be a massive board). Currently I am designing a smaller test version of the board with only 4 channels.
I have one of the channels fully finished already and I tried to copy it using the room copy function. I encountered a couple of problems.
1. Components with manually modified silk screen do not copy properly. There position in the destination room is not precise - they are slightly offset. I needed to manually modify the silk screen of those components since it was causing DRC violation due to proximity to other components. If I first updated all components from the libraries, everything copies well. Do you know what is causing the issue and a way around it? Could it be the change of the bounding rectangle shape/size? The only solution I have now is to first copy and then manually modify the silk screen in all channels, which is obviously very slow and inefficient process, compared to first modifying and then copying.
2. Arguably the bigger issue is that most of the polygons, fills and some of the vias copy but do not get their nets updated properly. They either keep the same net as in channel 1 or get a random net. Component pads and tracks connected to them seem to update properly. With the vias I noticed that the problematic ones are those which are connected to a polygon/fill and not connected to a track/component pad. I did a good search about the issue and noticed that other people have it as well. I couldn't find a good solution though.
My best solution (still not good enough) for now is to manually re-assign the polygon nets using smart features as select connected copper for example. At the end of the process I select all electrical primitives in the channel and use the PCB list to quickly scroll through them and see if they all have nets with suffix 2 for example (for channel 2). I also use the rat nest to see if the channel tries to connect to other channels, which would mean that some of the nets are still wrong. Those methods are very inefficient and slow while being not very reliable at the same time as well. You can see how doing all of that for 16 complex channels is a huge hassle.
Do you have any ideas how the copying of polygons and all vias can be done quickly and more reliably?
Thank you
I am working on a project including multi-channel design. I am using Altium 16.1.9. Each channel is fairly complex - over 500 components, fine pitch devices, micro and buried vias, many nets, polygons, etc. The final board will consist of 16 such channels + other blocks (it will be a massive board). Currently I am designing a smaller test version of the board with only 4 channels.
I have one of the channels fully finished already and I tried to copy it using the room copy function. I encountered a couple of problems.
1. Components with manually modified silk screen do not copy properly. There position in the destination room is not precise - they are slightly offset. I needed to manually modify the silk screen of those components since it was causing DRC violation due to proximity to other components. If I first updated all components from the libraries, everything copies well. Do you know what is causing the issue and a way around it? Could it be the change of the bounding rectangle shape/size? The only solution I have now is to first copy and then manually modify the silk screen in all channels, which is obviously very slow and inefficient process, compared to first modifying and then copying.
2. Arguably the bigger issue is that most of the polygons, fills and some of the vias copy but do not get their nets updated properly. They either keep the same net as in channel 1 or get a random net. Component pads and tracks connected to them seem to update properly. With the vias I noticed that the problematic ones are those which are connected to a polygon/fill and not connected to a track/component pad. I did a good search about the issue and noticed that other people have it as well. I couldn't find a good solution though.
My best solution (still not good enough) for now is to manually re-assign the polygon nets using smart features as select connected copper for example. At the end of the process I select all electrical primitives in the channel and use the PCB list to quickly scroll through them and see if they all have nets with suffix 2 for example (for channel 2). I also use the rat nest to see if the channel tries to connect to other channels, which would mean that some of the nets are still wrong. Those methods are very inefficient and slow while being not very reliable at the same time as well. You can see how doing all of that for 16 complex channels is a huge hassle.
Do you have any ideas how the copying of polygons and all vias can be done quickly and more reliably?
Thank you
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