PADS® Importer Enhancements

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Modified by Admin on Sep 13, 2017

The PADS® PCB importer has undergone a substantial review and update for the Altium Designer 14.3 release.

The update has focused on two main areas: streamlining the import of design rules, to reduce and rationalize the number of rules while improving how they target the required objects; and to provide broader support for PADS design objects.

Streamlined Rules Import

PADS and Altium Designer use different approaches to defining the design requirements as design rules. This can result in a large number of design rules being created when a PCB is imported into Altium Designer.

The import improvements that relate to design rules include:

Hueristics added to rule scoping - used for tasks such as applying higher-order polygon and power plane connect style rules during import. For example, rules targeting all component pads are replaced by a single rule targeting the component.
Rule rationalization - rules with identical values that target different objects are merged into a single rule, and then scoped appropriately to target all the objects targeted in the source PADS design file.
Clearance rules import redesign - Altium Designer's clearance rule has been refactored to include a minimum clearance matrix, using this substantially reduces the number of clearance rules that must be created during import of a PADS PCB file.
Improved duplicate rule detection - better detection and removal of rules with identical values
Improved rule naming - a logical rule naming scheme has been implemented, of the form RULE_OBJECT[_VALUE]
Improved handling of default rules - default rules which are currently unused, are no longer imported.

Broader Support for Objects and Classes

Differential pairs now import correctly, and appropriately configured Differential Pair Routing rules are created.

Component rotation - issues where components could have the wrong rotation after import have been fixed.
Unknown objects - unknown objects are now ignored during import.
Classes - resolved issues with class creation and naming.

Supported Formats

PADS 9.5 ASCII and below.