--- In [email protected], Boris Barbour <barb...@...> wrote: > > > Hi, > > I am considering a design that would use blind and buried vias. However, KiCad > rather scarily says it is experimental, and the changelog seems to suggest it > cannot yet be used for production. Is it "known not to work" or "should work > but untested"? > > Would the potential problems be obvious (detected by DRC, for instance) or > might problems be silent? > > (In response to the question "are they absolutely necessary?", I'm not > completely sure, but I need to miniaturise a circuit by placing components on > both sides and there are also high-impedance signals that I wish to shield > with intermediate layers; traversing vias would reduce the shielding.) > > Best wishes, > > Boris
Boris, If the board is as tight as you say, you will want to use the Freerouter export and route the board in Freerouter manually (not auto-routed). Without "push and shove" routing, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to route a dense board in PCBNEW. However, the combination of PCBNEW and Freerouter makes it possible to route very complex boards, because the manual routing in Freerouter brings the push and shove capability. If you have future problems with this path, we stand by to help you with anything that looks like a software bug in Kicad. I wrote the round tripper to Freerouter, so I am pretty confident that it is reasonably solid now, and should support micro-vias. (Speaking about the SVN version, or a pending February 2009 release.) The only thing you have to do is manually dress up the DSN text file with net classes on each trip over to Freerouter. There will be several trips over and back, because your copper zones need to be done in PCBNEW, wherease the tracks and vias, and component positioning are done in Freerouter. Search this list for previous discussion on "net class" or "net classes". Freerouter is a world class manual router. It is also an auto-router, but I don't use that extensively, only on a track by track basis, never to route a whole board. Once you export to Freerouter, you always have to select a region of tracks, and "un-fix" them so that they become editable or movable during push and shove. Dick
