This may not be the same situation, but we had a $10K error that was caused by DXP 2004. We imported a 99SE design into DXP since DXP handles power plane edges better. We didn't notice a little option about handling split planes so DXP disconnected all of the 3.3V nets from the power plane. I was real pleased, not to mention missing a serious deadline, although it was clearly my fault for not suspecting Protel would do such a completely stupid thing. I did check the gerbers for things that I knew were different and we had no problems with previous revs.
Tom
Matt Polak wrote:
Hey Gang,
We've come across a *major* show-stopper problem on some boards we just got back from our board house. For whatever reason, there are a few spots where DXP decided that our vias should just not randomly connect to the power planes their nets are assigned to. Most of the board is fine, but we've already found one major cluster that's problematic. Take a look at this...
http://www.raven-systems.com/temp/missing_connections.gif
As you can clearly see, when viewing the power plane connections in the layout editor, the interconnects show fine. When viewing the verbatim generated Gerbers, however (RIGHT IN DXP!) there are missing plane connections! The entire top set of 7 vias are not connected to ANY planes, whilst the bottom row are connected just fine where appropriate. I looked at the properties of all of the top-row vias, and they're just fine - nothing out of the ordinary. Surprisingly most of the other vias on the board (including the bottom row) connect just fine!!
Has anyone seen this, or know of a way to have DXP scan for it, or fix it? We just lost a lot of time and money on this spin-and-assemble due to this export problem, and I have a feeling we'll likely be finding more of these little via issues as we continue to bring the board up. And worse yet, we have to do another Gerber generation - am I going to have to hand-check several thousand vias on the Gerber outputs to ensure this doesn't happen again?
Honestly, this is bringing me to an absolute last straw in continuing to use Protel if we can't even be guaranteed consistent WYSIWYG output. Someone PLEASE tell me we did something wrong? I'm starting to lose patience with Altium's little "features" in the software.
Frustrated as hell, -- Matt
At 07:47 AM 3/16/05, you wrote:
Hello All,
I have a PCB design that has several ground planes in it. I have all of
the ground vias directly connected to the planes. I have all of the
thru-hole components grounds connected using thermal reliefs. If I look at
the PCB with the internal planes tab selected and with the multi layer view
option turned off, I see the thermal reliefs.
When I generate the gerbers using the embedded apertures (RS274X), most of
the thermal reliefs are gone. This only happens with the power planes. I
have several polygons in this design and their thermal reliefs are intact.
Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone know what I am doing wrong? Any
information that you can give me will be greatly appreciated. Thank you for
your time.
John Branthoover :
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