As I've been told, the general consensus is that you should not use the built-in autorouter. I too have just done my first board (4 layers, 8"x11"), with a lot of help and hand-holding from the wonderful contributors to this list. I basicaly had to just hand-route the entire board. It wasn't that hard once I just convinced myself to just do it.
There is the external autorouter that seems to work pretty well. You have to make sure your PCB edges are defined VERY carefully and each segment is drawn in order. Just because it LOOKS right does not mean it will work right. I just created a spreadsheet with the coordinates of all of the vertices on my board and then used that to hand-edit the board edges in the .BRD file. I did notice a few quirks along the way. I tried putting vias under the surface mount pads to save room. This seemed to work well for components on the compoent side, but any time the component was on the coppor side, the via would not connect to the pad. Dunno why this was the case, but I stopped trying to put vias under pads on the copper side and everything went fine. I noticed some problems when I dragged components and traces. If the moved segment overlaps an existing part of the segment, it doesn't always detect that it is still the same segment/net and is actually connected. I had to go and delete several traces and redo them as a contiguous segment before it could pass the DRC checks. Maybe this could be an enhancement request to have an automated "cleanup function" that could analyze the segments and merge segments together to clean up these kinds of things? Also, make SURE you have the final version from Feb 2009 and not some earlier version. It seems all the earlier ones did not detect connections to zones on inner layers very well. That caused me no end of grief. I know this is not exactly the answer to the question you were looking for, but I hope it helps nudge you in the right direction. Greg ________________________________ From: sieg1974 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:09:46 AM Subject: [kicad-users] How to autoroute a multilayer board? Hi all, I just started using kicad, and I can't figure out how to use its autoroute tool to route a 4-layer board. When preference->general->layers is 1, it uses the copper layer to route. But when preference->general->layers is 2...16, it just uses the Copper and Component layers to route, and none of the inner layers. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong, or were I can find more information about it? Thanks in advance, Andre ------------------------------------ Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links
