Glossing must be OFF to simplify creating 90 Degree Corners
Altium PCB Designer
Altium Designer Notebook
Monday, September 16, 2024
90 Degree Routing - Glossing Off
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Ethernet PHY - Length Matching
Ethernet PHY PCB Design Layout Checklist
The total length of each MDI trace should be less than 2 inches, or 2000 mils.
The traces should be lengthmatched within 20 mils for 1G transmissions and within 50 mils for 100M or 10M transmissions.
The number of vias and stubs on the MDI traces should be kept to a minimum.
The traces should be length- matched within . . .
20 mils for 1G transmissions
50 mils for 100M or 10M transmissions.
ISSI SRAM/SDRAM Layout Guide
See . . .
AN42S01.AN - ISSI SRAM/SDRAM Layout Guide
Using SDRAM vs. DDR RAM in Your PCB Design | Blog | Altium Designer
ISSI DDR3 SDRAM Layout Guidelines (Download PDF)
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Nine Dot Connects - Library Services
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Nine Dot Connects - Library Services
If you have a limited budget and like to do things yourself then I recommend you take Parts for free test drive.
Link to Parts https://pcbparts.blogspot.com/p/welcome.html
Parts is a Scalable Database Library Managment Solution for Altium users.
Parts can be used to quickly create and manage an Access or MySQL Database Library.
To request technical support or a Free Parts online demonstration contact me at Parts.
Link: Contact Parts
Thank you for your support
Randy Clemmons
Routing Options - Explained
Interactive Routing Options - Online Altium (Login Required)
Gloss Effort (Routed) and Gloss Effort (Neighbor).
You may think of Gloss as a postprocessor: after the trace is put in and conflicts resolved, it straightens the result to get rid of corners and other uglies.
If it is Off, uglies are preserved, if Weak - the geometry of the trace mainly preserved, just locally smoothed, if Strong - the trace is made pretty much as short as possible.
See the pictures. Thin white line in all cases shows the trace as it was initially put in, thenthe first picture shows how it came out after conflict resolution, Gloss (Routed) Off
the second - removed sharp corners and small jogs, Gloss (Routed) Weak
the third - tightened it, Gloss (Routed) Strong.
In addition to this, notice that not only the trace being routed may need improvement after conflict resolution, but also its neighbors, if they got pushed:
Again, the same three levels of Glossing are possible, and that is controlled By Gloss Effort (Neighbor) setting.
This is a small option. It controls what happens when during routing you click on a target to complete a connection.
Controls Pad Entry, which is also the responsibility of Gloss (no Pad Entry if Gloss (Routed) is Off)
In this picture you see the thin white line showing the trace that was originally put in, and the final result, where Gloss improved the pad entry.
You may not think much of this improvement, but consider also these two cases:
Here keeping the middle entry caused a nasty acute angle at pad edge, and shifting it to the side is probably welcome.
So, Pad Entry Stability setting tells Gloss how close the corner has to be to the pad edge when shifting entry sideways becomes allowed.
This is related to Trace Centering option.
Otherwise the trace will be put at (normal + additional) clearance from obstacles, so in this case it will be not so much "trace centering" as "preferred clearance".
The value of the additional clearance, is controlled by Added Clearance Ratio.
Consider the case when after a click while routing, you make a sharp turn.
Not everyone likes to have those right angles in their traces, which is when the miters come to the rescue - also the responsibility of Gloss.
Here the white thin line starts from the click point, but as you can see, a small portion of the previously committed trace is cut off and a short diagonal segment is inserted.
Miter Ratio controls the length of the miters used by the router. Since miters can be arcs as well as segments, they are defined in terms of "sharpest turn radius" as a multiple of trace width.
Miter Ratio 1 allows the radius equal to trace width, which can be plainly seen for arcs:
and not so plainly, but still true, for tracks: