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Manually routing large, complex, high-density boards can be tedious and time consuming. With the number of routing possibilities, your board becomes a puzzle that could take hours, days or even weeks to solve and with deadlines getting shorter, every second counts in the design process. However, by automating some or all of your routing, you can ensure your design is completed on time. OrCAD helps you do this with an industry standard Auto-router. Set up the required parameters for the auto-router to follow and define the number of passes. Set preferences for fanouts, vias, tuning, testpoints and more;then let the auto-router do the work.

Rigid- Flex boards result in increasing complex designs and constraints. Many constraints need to be considered that are not necessary in standard PCB designs. These Design Rules can be difficult to manage and check in a Rigid-Flex design, especially in transition zones where constraints are layer specific and different for the flex and rigid parts of the design. Manual checking of these zones can result in oversights and design errors. Dynamic Zone DRC Checking can help you manufacture with confidence by automating this process. Now, you can define and manage zones in the PCB. With Dynamic Zone DRC, any zone or inter-layer errors are flagged with a DRC marker. Check transition zones for via and routing constraints. Ensure cover lay openings and gold masks are aligned for proper conductivity.

When working with different manufacturers, it can be difficult to keep track of the specific minimum tolerances for production. Incorrect values can lead to manufacturing errors such as the creation of slivers and islands, solder bridges, acid traps and more. Depending on the severity, manufacturing can come to a halt, causing lengthy delays in your design process while these issues are resolved or a costly design re-spin is completed. However, by checking for the correct tolerances in your design, you can streamline production. OrCAD helps you do this with the ability to import design constraints. Easily manage the specifications for multiple board houses by importing a saved constraint file. All the constraints for the fabrication house are automatically populated in the constraint manager and DRC markers flag any errors on the board. By importing saved constraint files, you can save time and ensure manufacturing specifications are met; thus, resulting in a reduction of DFM issues and a streamlined manufacturing process.

With the size of devices decreasing and frequencies increasing, the need for managing electromagnetic interference in RF Designs is more important than ever. This disturbance by an outside source can cause a variety of issues in your design including a decrease in signal and power integrity, addition of cross talk, resonance and ringing, or even complete circuit failure. Designing for these issues at the board level is a tedious and time-consuming part of the design process, but allows you to ensure your design intent is not affected. A common, inexpensive solution is to include via shielding in your design. OrCAD helps you do this using Via Arrays. Automatically insert a group of vias in a matrix pattern over the entire board, an area inside a boundary box, or in a dynamic shape. And place vias as a boundary around a shape, hole, route keepout, cline, via, or pin. By placing vias with proper spacing around the edge of your board or high-risk areas, you can reduce EMI and cross talk. Design changes are made easy with the ability to unplace all vias automatically. Quickly and easily add and edit the necessary via shielding and ensure your RF designs are not affected by EMI with Via Arrays in OrCAD PCB Designer.

Running traces over voids and split planes can cause impedance and noise control issues. Signal traces must be routed over an uninterrupted copper plane to ensure continuous loop or return path current. However, by automatically identifying problem traces, you can eliminate the need for time consuming, error-prone manual scanning on every layer of the board. OrCAD helps you do this with Segment Over Void detection. Now, problem traces are reported with the click of a button and highlighted for your review.

Matching trace lengths for large-bit buses and differential pairs in your design is vital. However, this can be a tedious process and mismatched lengths can result in signal quality and integrity issues. Signals may need to be synchronized with clocks and unmatched differential pairs create additional noise. Any of these issues can be detrimental to your design. However, by automating the process you can improve signal quality and reduce time and errors, allowing you to focus on more important aspects of the design. OrCAD helps you do this with constraints for Net Groups. Create Constraints for minimum and maximum propagation delay in mils, nanoseconds or percentage. Or set constraints for total etch length. Create Net Groups and assign the constraints to all the nets in a group. Analyze the constraints without ever leaving the Constraint Manager. DRC Markers flag any incorrect lengths in real-time. Eliminate the need to check each individual net with OrCAD PCB Designer.

Maintaining the rules for tight pin areas can be timing consuming. Manually making changes to tight-pin areas takes up time you could be using to concentrate on more important tasks. OrCAD helps you eliminate the need for manual checks and changes through constraint regions. You define constraints physical and spacing constraints for specific regions and OrCAD automatically follows these constraints when routing.

Getting arcs equally spaced when routing a bus around a curved, flex circuit is not easy. With routing software offering a grid-based approach, this often leads to sloppy spacing and inadequate contour routing. However, with OrCAD contour etch routing, the software understands you are routing a bus with a unique contour and gives you the ability to specify the spacing between each one. This allows it routes to be completed uniformly and correctly spaced, all while performing DRC checks along the way to ensure you are adhering to set rules.

A technical overview of the constraint manager within OrCAD.