Positive Power Planes and Template Areas

Positive Power Planes

Designs often contain multiple power nets. There is often a need for each of these power nets to be connected together in individual copper areas. These can be full or partial power planes. To achieve this, eCADSTAR uses Template copper areas. In the next task you will route the power connection GND0V and VCC to a positive inner layer power planes.

Template Area

For even more control over conductive area fills, you can use templates. These are used to control the boundaries and self-healing behavior of the shapes. Template area functions are found on the Net/Route tab.

Figure 1: Template Area Settings

Template area settings allow user-defined layers to be associated with conductor layers. For example:

  • Top_Template for Conductor-1
  • Inner_Signal2_Template for Conductor-2
  • Inner_Signal3_Template for Conductor-3
  • Bottom_Template for Conductor-4

Template layers can be associated with more than one conductor layer and different signals per layer. This is useful where full positive planes are required on multiple layers.

Overview

  • Ensure that all conductor layers are displayed in the Layer Settings panel.
  • In the Template Area Settings dialog, associate the required user-defined layers to conductor layers. See Figure 1, above.
  • Select the relevant conductor layer as the active layer.
  • Zoom around the relevant section of the design.
  • Select Shape > Area Fill > Rectangle on the eCADSTAR PCB Editor ribbon.
  • From the command panel ensure to set template area to ON to enable the addition of the related template shape.
  • Click on a relevant pad (for example, GND) and select it, and then click two diagonal points to create a large rectangle.
  • The area fill will be generated immediately.

Templates provide the following additional benefits:

  • You can assign priorities to templates. This allows a higher-priority template to be poured before lessor-priority templates.
  • Thermal reliefs can be created using more than four connections as part of a template property.
  • Settings exist to eliminate unconnected copper areas and copper slivers.
Next topic: Task 12: Creating Templates on Inner Layers