BoardSurfers: An Introduction to Dimensioning in Allegro PCB Editor

With boards becoming more complex and lightweight at the same time, designing and manufacturing a cost-effective and reliable PCB has assumed greater significance than ever before. Inaccurate or incomplete design details can affect the fabrication of the board during its assembly process. Adding dimensions to a PCB design provides sufficient details about the design so that everything fits together when a board is out for manufacturing.

Why Dimensioning?

The main objective of dimensioning a PCB is to create a fabrication drawing that indicates critical hole locations, PCB cutouts, and overall PCB outline. This drawing ensures that the design intent is maintained, and the PCB is built with the appropriate materials and finishes. A complete manufacturing process includes a fabrication drawing along with Gerber and IPC files to assist in fabricating and inspecting the final PCB.

Cadence's Allegro® PCB Editor offers all the dimensioning features that conform to EDA industry standards that enable you to specify the dimensions of every component on a PCB. But where do you start? In this post, I will introduce you to the commands that you can use to apply dimensions to your design objects.

Enabling the Dimensioning Environment

Before starting with adding dimensions to your board, you must enable the dimensioning environment to get access to the various dimensioning commands.

• To enable the dimensioning environment, choose Manufacture - Dimension Environment.

The Command Window confirms that the dimensioning environment is enabled, and you can choose any dimension mode from the right-click pop-up menu.

Setting the Parameters

Before you start creating dimensions, you can set certain parameters for the dimensions. This can be done in the Parameters mode.

• Select Parameters from the right-click pop-up which opens the Dimensioning Parameters dialog where you can set the parameters.
  
  

Dimensioning Modes

The Dimensioning modes let you create and edit all types of dimensions. You can create multiple dimensions within each mode until you switch the mode, or terminate it by selecting the Done or Cancel options.

The following image provides a brief description of each of the dimensioning modes that Allegro PCB Editor offers.

Conclusion

The goal of adding dimensions to a PCB design is to provide sufficient details of the design so that everything fits together when you send your PCB for manufacturing. You can save days or weeks of delays on a project by spending some extra time while designing the PCB using the dimensioning tool that Allegro PCB Editor provides, to convey every detail to your manufacturing partners.

Keep watching this space for more posts on dimension modes and features.

Contact Us

For any feedback, including any topic you want to be covered, write to us at pcbbloggers@cadence.com.

Do SUBSCRIBE to be updated about upcoming blogs. 

About BoardSurfers

The BoardSurfers series provides solutions to the various tasks related to the creation and management of PCB design using the Allegro platform products. The name and logo of this series are designed to resonate with the vision of making the design and manufacturing tasks enjoyable just like surfing the waves. Regular, new blog posts by experts cover every aspect of the PCB design process, such as library management, schematic design, constraint management, stackup design, placement, routing, artwork, verification, and much more.