Routing in 16.6

Hi Roger, couple of things on this.

It breaks with the traditional form of routing from prior versions of Orcad/Allegro in that if you change the line width as you indicate above that line width will get retained for each new net you decide to route. While I had not used 16.6 much I can see where this new feature might cause a problem for users. I can also see that it might be useful in that if a user decides to change the line width as they route a board it would be handy to retain that line width as the design proceeds.

In the interest of backward compatibility I would have added the retention of last used line width as a "User Preference" instead of adding it in as they did. This way I believe there would be no surprises for existing users but that been said people that might have requested this feature would also be served.

The other thing is it breaks with how the route editor "Specctra" works in that manual routing in specctra works like it has done since time began :) similar to Allegro but now it does not because specctra does not retain a line width but reverts to the min line width of the design based on the design constraints as you route a new net.

Don’t think the implementation of this feature was well thought out because it breaks "'Expectations" of how routing lines should work.

I was thinking since the key is routing traces the following might add a huge productivity boost.

Modify the constraint manager so that all nets include the following for the design. Min Width, Conductor Width, Max Width, Step Width. The min and max we have but the conductor width and step are new. Conductor width is the actual desired trace width of the design, this was something that the older Layout tool had. Step is a parameter value that will allow the conductor width to be increased or decreased by a particular value bound by the min width and max width of the trace.

So how would this be.

At the start of your design you set min width to 4, conductor width to 10, max width to 20 and Step to 2. When you add a connect the connection for the net defaults to "10" but when you hold down the shift key and move the wheel on your mouse the line width would increase or decrease on the fly as you route in that trace. This would eliminate right click bit twiddling of the UI to set a line width etc, etc

Thanks Scott.