A key ingredient to successful board design is ensuring that all of the design objects are placed appropriately within the board outline. As the board shape and structure becomes more complex, with unusually shaped products housing rigid-flex board structures - this requirement becomes even more critical.
A new Board Outline Clearance design rule has been added to the Manufacturing category, allowing the designer to accurately specify how close design primitives can be placed to an edge of the board. Various edge types are supported, as detailed below.
The Board Outline Clearance rule specifying the to-edge clearance for primitives placed on the Bottom layer, in the FlexRegion of the board.
Supported Edge Types
The rule takes a layer-focused view of the board. That is, it determines the boundaries of each layer in turn, allowing it to support rigid-flex designs where certain layers are only present in the rigid regions, while others traverse from a rigid region across a flex region.
The table below defines the different edge types supported by this design rule:
| Edge Type | Definition |
|---|---|
| Outline Edge | The outer-most (exterior) edge of the board |
| Cavity Edge | The edge of a user-defined cavity |
| Cutout Edge | The edge of a user-defined cutout |
| Split Barrier | When a Split Line defines the edge of the board on this layer, this edge is referred to as a Split Line Barrier |
| Split Continuation | When this layer continues beyond a Split Line, this edge is referred to as a Split Line Continuation (a permeable boundary). To allow an object-kind to cross a Split Continuation set the clearance value to zero. In the example image above routing (tracks and arcs) can cross all split continuations, while other objects, such as pads and vias, cannot. Zero indicates to the software that these object-kinds are allowed to violate (pass over) this edge type. Use this technique to allow routed tracks, for example, to travel across from one Layer Stack Region to another. |
New Query Keywords
IsRuleBoardOutlineClearance