Manufacturing densely populated surface mount PCA's requires meeting a complex set of multi-dimensional spacing requirements. These requirements may be either hard limits or strong recommendations which may be traded off against specific tight spacing situations. Having the tool help you meet spacing requirements for maximum producibility, as well as give you guidance in how far you may push those limits in special cases, is a great productivity as well as manufacturability improvement.

Mentor tools have had the capability to specify component spacing rules by component type to type, with different spacings in X and Y and side. But most of the time you would really like to just specify different spacing in X and Y around a component type regardless of what component types are next to it. This effect can be achieved by setting the entire matrix of rules for the desired type to every other type used in the design, which can be a very large number of rules. Setting them or changing them is an intense process.

In this paper we detail how we have wrapped up all of this into a single configurable user choice. Whole classes of rules can be defined and presented to users as spacing rule classes which can be set for each design. In addition, this will describe some very useful enhancements to the component placement and move functions within layout that make the task of placing parts very easy.

Bio

For the last 7 years, Bob Sterrett has supported the PCB design process for the Colorado Springs operations of Hewlett-Packard's Electronic Instrument Group. Prior to this assignment, Bob's experiences included hardware product development, Unix system administration, marketing, and field technical support.