EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => Altium Designer => Topic started by: Christian Carlsson on December 14, 2016, 08:00:46 am
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Hello, our HW guys have some problems with slooooow Altium....
Conditions:
PCB size 396 mm x 351 mm, 10 layers
re-pour all polygon takes appr 1.5 hours - is this normal?
Laptop PC:
i7 - 2.80 Ghz
32 GB RAM
(no SSD)
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And I suppose there's enough components on that board to justify the size and layer count? (Thousands of nets, 10k's of pads?)
It may help to use planes instead of polygons, and use smaller polygons rather than board-size polygons.
Did anyone call service?
Tim
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Laptop PC:
i7 - 2.80 Ghz
32 GB RAM
Close all other applications plus multiple web browser tabs can chew up quite a lot of memory.
Also, fully shut down your laptop (rather than using "hibernate" or "suspend") to ensure all memory is freed up. Windows has a habit of hanging onto memory if multiple hibernates/suspends are the usual modus operandi.
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Thanks for feedback, answer in blue
And I suppose there's enough components on that board to justify the size and layer count? (Thousands of nets, 10k's of pads?)
Strange question, but - yes........
It may help to use planes instead of polygons, and use smaller polygons rather than board-size polygons.
Not applicable for this design
Did anyone call service?
First of many things we have tried....
Tim
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Laptop PC:
i7 - 2.80 Ghz
32 GB RAM
Close all other applications plus multiple web browser tabs can chew up quite a lot of memory.
Well, as Altium quite often "crash", a restart is made now and then, with Altium the only running application after restart......
Also, fully shut down your laptop (rather than using "hibernate" or "suspend") to ensure all memory is freed up. Windows has a habit of hanging onto memory if multiple hibernates/suspends are the usual modus operandi.
See above.....
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how many design rules do you have ? clearance rules in particular ... the more of those the longer the repour takes.
also : check the pouring order. you may have conflicts there.
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I think you can significantly speed up the pouring, if you can increase the arc approximation/maximum deviation. Also, if you have multiple pours on the same layer with the same net, merge them.
I havens worked with so complex PCB design yet, but few minutes was possible with 4-6 layers and few dozen polygons. I would shelve a bunch of those inner layer polygons and only touch them at the end. Also, I use some mechanical layers to set up poligon boundaries, just a technique I've found useful.
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In my experience (partially) disabling online DRC will vastly improve performance and reduce hours of wait time to just sluggish behaviour.
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What is the size of polygon?