SparkFun Forums

[msj121]

I put a square on the "tKeepOut" layer for my chip.... When I put a polygon (for ground plane) it goes over the keep out....

I even tried a line as a border.... Not Sure what to do....


Do I just build the circuit and the Gerber/cam files will take care of this later?

[nanohex]

Post a picture maybe? A bit hard to visualise this...

Why did you put a square on the tKeepOut layer around the chip? Any particular reason? The libraries should already take care of this for you.

In any case, there's no harm in generating the gerbers, then viewing them separately on a program such as gerbv! Also, did you set the "isolation" to at least 10 mil when drawing the polygon? This might be the problem, but hard to tell without a pic!

[msj121]

Thanks for your help. I have a chip in my library that has exposed points for testing, I want to lay a ground plane without touching these exposed spots. I wanted to add a square, or something to the keep out layer to inform the ground plane to not fill in that area when I switch back to my circuit.

Below is the part of the circuit in action:

[msj121]

In case anyone needs to know, you need to place the square on the tRestrict plane, not the tStop or tKeepOut. Hope that helps someone.

[voxmagna]

Yes, that helped me AFTER I spent ages working it out! To help others there is another trap when you use these not so commonly used layers. When I finished my routing and stopped the router driving its tracks through my teeny smds, I could not remove the restriction/stop /keep out masks on my layout. Although I must say the autorouter is a bit unpredictable and when re-routing did not always do as it was told.

Not using the layers hidden further down the drop down layer menu, I got confused by the 'pattern' and which layers they were on, thinking red hatch was a topside track layer. The smartest way I found to delete them was to enable ALL layers, then make them go away. For home production I will definitely restric the pad side of my SMDs in future.