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  3. Autoroute with Rooms and Doors

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Autoroute with Rooms and Doors

DrLightning
DrLightning over 14 years ago
I'm designing a mixed-signal (digital and analog) daughter board to a microprocessor core board. Space limitations dictate the "rooms" containing the inter-board connector and two analog-to-digital chips that straddle the digital-analog world. Consider these three rooms in a physical line, from connector to ADC1 to ADC2. Unrestricted auto-routing will run numerous digital control lines through the noise-sensitivity analog area of ADC1, in order to get from the connector to ADC2. It would be nice if I could use the "room" concept to restrict particular connection lines to there source and destination rooms. Shy of this, having a restriction that routing can never cross a room boundary would work, as long as a room could be designed with doors. This concept could also be applied to the flood filling of shapes on the power planes, in order to create the customary split ground plane to isolate digital and analog areas with only a single connection point (if not a ferrite bead as well).

The way I've done this instead is with a long but narrow, and meandering route keep-out polygon on every layer. I couldn't draw a keep-out line, so I made a long narrow polygon to mimic a line. Imagine the Great Wall of China. This is essentially my room boundary. Where the polygon strip doesn't connect into a closed loop is my "door". I have such a wall around ADC1, with the door facing right up against the connector's room. Digital routing from the connector to ADC2 wraps totally around the outside of the wall, and therefore outside of ADC1's room, including its analog areas. The door in the wall, of course, allows the digital signals from the connector that must reach ADC1 itself.

Regarding the split ground plane, I can put a single rectangle on the whole board. If the keep-out wall exists on the power plane layers, then the flood fill of the rectangle will have gaps along the wall, with a connecting tab at the door. This accomplishes the ground plane noise isolation intended by split ground planes. I'm doing the same with two digital ground planes (shapes) and six or more power planes (shapes), all existing on two physical layers.

As an enhancement, note I have an extra little room in the middle for an power supply. The split planes should actually connect at the power supply in the center, and not the connector at the edge. Therefore, I've actually played with the door location per layer. For the most part, the keep-out polygon wall exists at the same point on every layer. However, the door opening for the routing layers faces the connector at the edge of the board. The door opening on the power plane layers faces the power supply in the center. Thus, my routing goes where it's supposed to and my power plane gets split like it should, without my having to hand route or hand draw the two-edged splitting perimeter of each plane.

With all that said, I have things working very well. I didn't even use the actual OrCAD "room" facility, because I needed more accurate symbol placement anyway. Nevertheless, the copying and layer changing necessary to put the keep-out polygon wall on ever layer was a real pain. If the "room" feature could do this, including defining a different door location for routing layers and power plane layers, it would be fantastic.

Or, is there already a similar feature in the software that I should have used already?
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