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Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => Topic started by: matrixofdynamism on March 26, 2022, 12:13:27 am

Title: How do I know what to put in for rules in the Altium Designer?
Post by: matrixofdynamism on March 26, 2022, 12:13:27 am

The Altium Designer program has a very large set of rules that a person can specify for the PCB design process. So far I have not been able to find any type of "standard" rules file that I can import into the program. How does one know what rules to specify in the program? There are quite a LOT of rules to be specified in there. Also, if I am tampering with the rules, how can I put them back to the value that they were when I installed the program?

Title: Re: How do I know what to put in for rules in the Altium Designer?
Post by: Kean on March 26, 2022, 01:02:14 pm

Start by reading the docs which gives some examples and covers the process

https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/pcb-design-rule-types (https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/pcb-design-rule-types)
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/defining-scoping-managing-pcb-design-rules (https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/defining-scoping-managing-pcb-design-rules)

Rules are stored against a design, so no big worry about putting them back to installation defaults.  There are also options to export and import rules if you want to make a backup, or duplicate rules from one design into another.

The initial set of rules will be related to capabilities of your choice of PCB fabricator.  Some PCB fabs will provide a set of starting rules...

https://www.eurocircuits.com/altium-designer-templates-with-eurocircuits-design-rules/ (https://www.eurocircuits.com/altium-designer-templates-with-eurocircuits-design-rules/)
https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/42-how-to-export-altium-pcb-to-gerber-files (https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/42-how-to-export-altium-pcb-to-gerber-files)
https://docs.oshpark.com/design-tools/altium-designer/ (https://docs.oshpark.com/design-tools/altium-designer/)

Rules beyond that will depend on your design requirements, such as isolation distances between certain traces in a high voltage design, or for signal integrity if you are doing a high speed design.

Title: Re: How do I know what to put in for rules in the Altium Designer?
Post by: T3sl4co1l on March 26, 2022, 03:13:22 pm

I mean, standard is whatever your in-house standard is.  (Great thing about standards, there are so many? :P )  The PCB template starts with a basic set of defaults, though there are some changes you'll normally like to do for most designs.

That said, here's more or less the common set I use:

Tim