• Skip to main content
  • Skip to search
  • Skip to footer
Cadence Home
  • This search text may be transcribed, used, stored, or accessed by our third-party service providers per our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.

  1. Community Forums
  2. PCB Design
  3. What's a Good Way of Automatically Assigning a Clearance...

Stats

  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 1
  • Subscribers 166
  • Views 1664
  • Members are here 0
More Content
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

What's a Good Way of Automatically Assigning a Clearance from a Plane to a Pin or Class of Pins?

csoon1
csoon1 over 9 years ago

Just an overview, I have some though-hole pins on the bottom layer that are high-voltage. On the top surface is a huge polygon or plane designated as GND. On this GND plane, within the vicinity of the high-voltage holes, I wanted to specify a clearance of let's just say 100mils (to avoid arcing from the high-voltage pin to the GND plane).

At present, I manually added to the high-voltage pins some isolation/cavities on the polygon/shape assigned as the GND. This works for now because I have few pins. But when the number of high-voltage pins (and traces or other components) increases, manually defining the isolated areas become impractical.

So my question is, how can we do this automatically at Orcad PCB Editor (v16.6)?

With Altium Designer, I can simply add rules and create SQL-like statements to define that high-voltage pins should always have a 100-mil clearance from any other pin (trace, polygon, and etc).

On a separate question (but somehow related), on the Xsection (for Orcad PCB Editor), when I specify the layer type to be "Plane", I don't seem to see any difference on the actual layer when compared to the layer type being set as "Conductor". On Altium Designer, if a layer is specified as a plane, a polygon covering the entire layer is automatically defined which you can set to any "net" (for example GND). On Orcad PCB, when I set the layer to a "plane", I don't see anything unique happening on the layer. I can still add any shape to this layer like it's a "conductor" type of layer. I may be overlooking something here.

  • Cancel
Parents
  • redwire
    redwire over 9 years ago

    You are correct about "plane" vs "conductor" -- that is only used by the 2D solver for impedance.  It has no effect for clearances.

    Clearances (by layer) are managed by Constraint Manager.  You can set rules by net, net class, layer, pin, etc....What you're doing is fairly normal from a clearance rule-set.  Not sure if you've been thru the Constraint Manager tutorial but I believe what you're looking for is covered in there.

    If you get totally stuck you might have to post your database up here and let one of us take a look at it...

    • Cancel
    • Vote Up 0 Vote Down
    • Cancel
Reply
  • redwire
    redwire over 9 years ago

    You are correct about "plane" vs "conductor" -- that is only used by the 2D solver for impedance.  It has no effect for clearances.

    Clearances (by layer) are managed by Constraint Manager.  You can set rules by net, net class, layer, pin, etc....What you're doing is fairly normal from a clearance rule-set.  Not sure if you've been thru the Constraint Manager tutorial but I believe what you're looking for is covered in there.

    If you get totally stuck you might have to post your database up here and let one of us take a look at it...

    • Cancel
    • Vote Up 0 Vote Down
    • Cancel
Children
No Data
Cadence Guidelines

Community Guidelines

The Cadence Design Communities support Cadence users and technologists interacting to exchange ideas, news, technical information, and best practices to solve problems and get the most from Cadence technology. The community is open to everyone, and to provide the most value, we require participants to follow our Community Guidelines that facilitate a quality exchange of ideas and information. By accessing, contributing, using or downloading any materials from the site, you agree to be bound by the full Community Guidelines.

© 2025 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy
  • Cookie Policy
  • US Trademarks
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information