Hey Protel'ers,
Thanks so much for all of your support and suggestions on the plane-connect issues several weeks ago; the amount of immediate feedback this forum shows is just incredible! I wish I was able to contribute as many answers as I have questions, but I guess in the process everyone gets to learn, anyhow, so it's all good! I appologize in taking a while to get reply back - I've been out of town, and things have been crazy-busy as usual; you know the drill!
As far as our problem goes with the plane-connects / missing apetures, we never got a real resolve on it, but here's some more info about it:
1> The problem DOES appear to be random and unprecedented - we regenerated the Gerber set EXACTLY from the origional files without touching anything, and the problem went completely away on the Gerbers! [Argh - nothing to work from on this! You all gave great suggestions on how to attack this if it WAS reproducable!]
2> Because of this unreproducable nature, unfortunatly there's not much Altium is able to do, since the problem does not seem to be reproducable in any capacity. [D'oh!]
3> We've gone over to setting up a layer-view in CamTastic and essentially confirming connections on all vias - thankfully if you set the layer draw order up just right, you can fairly easily spot these sort of issues, but it's annoying when you have a board with several thousand vias on it! Certainly easy to miss one.
4> Netlist comparisons on CamTastic (at least on DXP) seem to be useless for checking for this missing apeture problem - besides the fact that DXP can't read its own native exported netlist format (!!), and the only way you can produce a useful netlist is with a semi-hack revolving around the testpoint generating feature, we had no luck with the netlist comparisons that we DID run actually verifying the opens/missing apetures on the planes. Camtastic DID prove useful in finding some additional, subtle geometry errors however, which the standard layout DRC missed, so I'm glad we've started running a DRC in there as well. I just wish they would better unify all of this!!
I'm really starting to wonder if writing an external "Gerber-Checker" wouldn't be a useful thing to do. It could even just run in text-mode, and analyze "weird" conditions like the 'trace-to-via but missing thermal-apeture" sort of situation I've encountered, and report the locations. Without rhyme or reason on why the thermal relief apetures are missing, and without being able to reproduce the output, I'm really starting to get a bit worried about generating *larger* boards. Thankfully our Protel issue only pooched a small set of 4-layer boards which we caught after only populating one in-house - I can only imagine how much it would cost occuring on a 8-10 layer (or more) board with several thousand parts populated by a contract manufacturer.
For you Protel macro and scripting wizards out there... Is it possible to write some sort of a plug-in to check for this missing apetures sort of thing right in Camtastic? I'm starting to get desperate, and looking at other CAD packages out there, Protel surprisingly still seems to be the best of the bunch.
Best Regards,
-- Matt
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