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  3. Does anyone else dislike the "Line Width Retention" feature...

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Does anyone else dislike the "Line Width Retention" feature?

EvanShultz
EvanShultz over 12 years ago
Branching off from http://www.cadence.com/forums/p/16025/1322497.aspx, which originated my question in that post.
 
Am I the only one who finds the line width retention to be a real pain and a hindrance to getting work done? We make heavy use of constraints in our designs, and so the line width is mostly driven by the constraints. In rare cases manual setting of line widths are needed.
 
I also keep the Options tab closed since it eats up valuable PCB canvas area, and I use keyboard commands frequently so I don't need to use the Options tab for most commands. The complex commands that require me to think and break from the placing/routing process don't cause must additional disruption to go to the Options tab, but when I laying down parts or copper I want to have all the monitor are available to see what I'm doing and I get along just fine without the Options tab open. 

If I make a manual change to line width, the next net that I route should typically go back to Constraint, because the constraint generally determines the correct line width for all nets. So this new feature means more trips back to the Options tab, wasting time.

If I'm working with a partially-routed cline, I usually want to pick up the line width of that cline. This is also annoying because the retained line width isn't always (in fact, it usually isn't) the line width of the partially-routed cline. Again, I have to make a journey to the Options tab which slows down my progress. Sometimes the partially-routed line width is picked up, while other times the last-used line width is used; I haven't figured out what makes either condition occur.

I can think of two options to make my life easier:

 

  1. A way to disable line width retention.
  2. Have line width displayed in the status bar of the Allegro window, so that I can easily see the current line width with the Options tab closed.

 

Also, as I mentioned in the post linked above, I want to change line width with the mouse wheel during routing without losing PCB canvas area due to the Options tab being open. Assuming I can do that, this becomes even more of a problem because I now have the ability to change the line width with the Options tab closed, and I have no way to visually identify/confirm the current line width. Nor do I necessarily know what line width has been retained (I can guess and with fairly high accuracy, but there's no UI feature to show me for sure).

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  • edhickey
    edhickey over 12 years ago

    A user preference variable for disabling this behavior is now available. You will need to upgrade Allegro to version 16.60.011.

    variable name - acon_no_width_override_retain

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  • edhickey
    edhickey over 12 years ago

    A user preference variable for disabling this behavior is now available. You will need to upgrade Allegro to version 16.60.011.

    variable name - acon_no_width_override_retain

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