Auto routing a 4 layer board

[Simon]

I'm trying to route a board.As it needs to carry 10 A I have chosen to have to power planes once the negative and one for positive as the central layers. This is because it would make life easier to route the components on the top and I will also need to use the top layer as some heat sinking.

The auto route is failing to work doing an absolutely disastrous job and just completely missing many possible routes. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the settings relating to vias and clearances as most beers will have to go through 2 layers to reach the other side.

The dip trace help pages are pretty useless. Will the also route sort out via types on its own or do I need to define each type of via myself so that the auto root router can use it

[Rerouter]

Now i am not that familiar with diptrace, but it seems like you can export and have another autorouter take a crack,

e.g. as described here,
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/diptrace/autorouting-smd-much-worse-than-pth/

[BloodyCactus]

I'm trying to route a board.As it needs to carry 10 A I have chosen to have to power planes once the negative and one for positive as the central layers. This is because it would make life easier to route the components on the top and I will also need to use the top layer as some heat sinking.

The auto route is failing to work doing an absolutely disastrous job and just completely missing many possible routes. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the settings relating to vias and clearances as most beers will have to go through 2 layers to reach the other side.

The dip trace help pages are pretty useless. Will the also route sort out via types on its own or do I need to define each type of via myself so that the auto root router can use it

did you, when you made those two extra layers create the fill with attached net then have the fill size to the pcb size automatically for each layer? I've done 4 layer boards with gnd/vcc as internal and the autorouter will route (terribly, but no better or worse than routing 2 layer).

[Simon]

I'm not sure what you mean about having the fill automatically fill the board. I have created a copper pour for each layer and have made it almost the same size as the board. The copper pours have been attached to the related nets.

It would seem that this is a similar problem to routine with copper pours that we discussed before on another thread where if a component is connected via a copper pour the program leaves the rat lines in as though the components are not connected together despite the fact they were individually connected to the same pour.

Now that I have created vias to go between each potential pair of layers I am getting less collision errors.

Once again the dip trace auto router proves to be very inadequate and not a finished product.

[BloodyCactus]

This is what I have,

1 - I create layer, pick its net (VCC)


2 - I select the layer, create a copper pour, connect it to net VCC and hide all ratlines


3 - check snap border to outline


done. now this is on a through hole board so my pins cross layers and things connect automatically.