PCB Design Blogs

With the current scenario of COVID-19, you cannot do without rules. You have to soak vegetables in brine for ten minutes, wash milk in plastic packaging with soap, sanitize metals with an alcoholic solution (70% and above), and whatnot. Well, you get the hang of it - It’s difficult. You have that constant doubt running through your mind; did I sanitize the shampoo bottle? Thanks to RAVEL Rules in PCB, you can manage your designs much better.

In the world of PCBs, running RAVEL Rules from the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of Allegro layout editors, Allegro PCB Editor, and Allegro Package Designer Plus allows you to make your own rules. To open DFM RAVEL Rules GUI from the Allegro layout editors, choose Manufacture – Setup RAVEL Rules in CM.

DFM RAVEL Rules GUI is a two-folder tab – one is PCBRules that comes with the predefined RAVEL Rules, and the other is the UserDefinedRules tab where you can load your own user-defined RAVEL Rules. To load your custom-written RAVEL Rules, choose Rules – Add User Defined Rules. You can then navigate to the directory where your rules are stored.

The rules are loaded by the folder, and all the RAVEL files in the selected folder will be loaded. You can also see that some parameters have been set up in the rule. These parameters are set up as constraints, but you can change these values before running the rule. To run any of the rules, select the rules to be run, and then click OK.

After the rules run successfully, the log file will open indicating which rules ran and how long they took. If there are any violations generated by the rule, they will appear in the externally-generated DRC worksheet of the Constraint Manager. You can view DRCs in the DRC Browser window that comes up when you choose Tools – DRC Browser. Select the DRC, right-click, and choose Display. The Allegro layout editor automatically navigates to the DRC location and the design rule marker indicates the violation.

To learn in detail about this feature, watch the How to Run a RAVEL Rule from the GUI video on the Cadence Support portal. Click the video link now or visit Cadence Support and search for this video under Video Library.

I hope that this video will help you in running custom-made RAVEL Rules from the GUI more easily and effectively from within the Allegro layout editors.

If you want to learn more about the concepts of RAVEL in detail, do check this two-days course on the RAVEL programming language.

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Thanks for reading and see you next time for more on Training Insights. Stay tuned till then.