Drill Drawing - Fab Drawing

How to create a fab drawing with drill charts for blind and through vias.

The example fab drawing shown below has four pages. 

The pages frames and fab notes are not shown in the screen shots to hide confidential data.

Page 1 has the Stackup and Fab notes.

click on images to view















Page 2 has the Drill table and Drill Chart for Layer 1 to 16.




Page 3 has the Drill table and Drill Chart for Layer 1 to 8

Page 4 has the Drill table and Drill Chart for Layer 9 to 16

How it was done.

I used three mechanical layers to display the via symbols above the drill charts.

Note the drill table is placed only once on the Drill Drawing Layer in the design.

Outjob setup for PDF Fab Drawing with three drill tables and charts.




Example for Layer 1 to 8 blind vias.

Choose the drill layers Start = L1 and Last = L8.

Example for Layer 9 to 16 blind vias.

Choose the drill layers Start = L9 and Last = L16.

That's It !

Drill Chart Properties

Selecting the new Drill Chart Properties can leave you frustrated.

Right Click the upper left handle in the table's corner to bring up the properties dialog.

Good luck, it's kinda of random that you will bring up drill table properties, more often than not you end up selecting a track in the table's frame.

Please let me know if you have a better method.

That's it.

Drill Table - Panel.doc Issues

Drill tables are coming into the Panel.doc from single boards and these tables do not account for the additional holes in the Panel.doc for rat bites and slots.

If you have four PCBs in your Panel.doc you will end up with four drill tables, plus a fifth drill table if you place a drill table in your Panel.doc.

The Panel.doc drill table will account for all of the drills including any rat bites and slots.

The only solution I have found is to delete the drill tables on the individual PCBs and add a drill table to the Panel.doc.

Altium Bug Crunch #2059

Drill Table - Bugs

As shown below you can get different results for the Drill Table in Altium depending on which method you choose to display your drill tables

Shown below are Drill tables for the same design with different results.

The new drill table shows a 124 holes.

New Drill Table ( Menu > Place > Drill Table)




While the legacy (.legend) Drill tables has 118 holes for the same design.  I believe when Altium created the new drill table the legacy table was inadvertently broken.

If you have legacy (.legend) drill tables in your older designs and you re-spin the board you need to delete the legacy (.legend) table and replace it with the new Drill Table. 

If you leave the legacy (.legend) drill table in your design, the drill table may not be in agreement with the NC Drill file.  

I had a couple projects on hold recently because the fab drawing was not in agreement with the drill files. I explained to my fabricator that I was using Altium, that they should follow the NC Drill file and ignore the Altium Drill table.

Also it is common to have dimmed rows in the the legacy table on the fab drawing as shown below if symbols are used to display the drills. The fix is to use characters.

The legacy Drill Table (.legend)
Symbols

As shown below changing the same legacy drill table above to use characters fixed the dimmed rows. 

Also if you have a lot of drills in the legacy table symbols may be repeated for different size holes, which is why another reason why characters should be used instead of symbols.

The legacy Drill Table (.legend)
Letters

I filed a bug (#3422) which has zero votes at Altium Live. So I'm not expecting to see a fix for the legacy drill table.

When I re-spin a board I need to remember to delete the .legend table and place the new drill table. 

PCB Release Failed

Another problem has surfaced, when using the PCB Release Manager to Generate Outputs.

Output generation failed with .legend (legacy drill tables).

Solution !!!

Always replace the .legend (legacy Drill Tables) with the new Drill Table.

PCB > Place > Drill Table

Live Drill Table

Altium introduced the Live Drill Table in AD13.

The live drill table is scale-able which is nice, but I really don't see the value of the feature which updates the drill table every time I drop another via in the board. 

My main rant is that my fab drawings looked better when I used the old .legacy table.

For example here is screen shot of the .legacy


Click on images for better viewing

Below is what the same board  looks like after placing the new live drill table.

Nasty big graphic symbols, so crowded together that you can't tell what is what.

Also in the live drill table the option to use letters vice symbols appears to have been deprecated.

Sorry about the ranting today. AD14 was just released and with every new release I get a little angry. This because I'm getting tired of new features being introduced when in my opinion the Altium design software team should be focused on fixing bugs, adding better error handling to minimize the crashes and error reports.

As pointed out by Petr the Drill symbols can be scaled in the Outjob configuration.

New in 13.2.5 - Live Drill Drawing Table

Live Drill Drawing Table - English documentation - The Altium Wiki:

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