Preserving unused via pads on plane layers

[edddd]

How do I preserve unused via pads on plane layers? The remove / restore unused pad shapes function appears only to affect signal layers (not plane layers). I'm using Altium Designer 23.2.1.

[Doctorandus_P]

The industry term for these is "NFP" which is: Non-Functional Pad. I did some reading about this just yesterday and there does not seem to be much reason to ever keep them on the PCB, while removing has quite noticeable advantages.

So to turn the question around, why do you want to keep them?

[langwadt]

The industry term for these is "NFP" which is: Non-Functional Pad. I did some reading about this just yesterday and there does not seem to be much reason to ever keep them on the PCB, while removing has quite noticeable advantages.

So to turn the question around, why do you want to keep them?

afaiu some pcb manufacturers will even remove them by default, so they only thing you get from keeping them is bigger holes in the planes and less space for routing

[edddd]

In general, I totally agree with you. Unused pads are just a waste of space.

In this case, it's a 10 layer board with blind vias (L1-L5 and L6-L10), where L5 and L6 (in addition to L2 and L9) are plane layers (power and ground). The PCB house complained about missing via pads on L5 and L6. Apparently, they would like pads on start / end layers for the blind vias.