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X AI Product Guide

Evaluating Results

When evaluating component placement, to improve efficiency colors can be assigned to nets, rooms, side of the board, and more. This will help you to verify components were placed in the correct rooms and visualize the connection paths.

Toggle the “Show Cluster Visualization” button in Allegro X AI to turn on colors for room area clusters or get instructions for manually assigning colors here.

Troubleshooting X AI for Component Placement

Below are some common issues when using Allegro X AI for component placement, the causes, and potential steps that can be taken for resolution:

Components Are Not Placed Inside Hard Rooms 

Cause: Rooms are likely too constrained.

Solutions: This can be resolved a number of ways including the following: 

  • Remove unnecessary hard rooms
  • Fix ICs (preferably 1-2 important ICs in the design)
  • Extend hard room boundary
  • Ensure room layer definition is consistent with component layers
  • Ensure correct IC is fixed inside the corresponding hard room
  • Remove keepouts

Components Are Unevenly Clustered on the Board (Constrained to a Specific Area)

Cause: This is likely caused by an excess of keepout regions.

Solution: Remove keepouts.

Specific Type of Components have DRCs or are Left Off the Board

Cause: Class layer rules are not correct.

Solution: Setup the class layer rules for the component (try BOTH).

This can be common with through-hole test points. Be sure to configure the class layer rule as BOTH.

Scattered Components Across Whole Design or Room

Cause: Any of the previous causes.

Solution: Start from day 0 design state. Assign class layers to BOTH and make the design less constrained including:

  • Remove hard rooms
  • Remove package keepouts
  • Remove height restrictions

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