From the course: Learning PCB Design with OrCAD

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Manufacturing and design constraints

Manufacturing and design constraints - OrCAD Tutorial

From the course: Learning PCB Design with OrCAD

Manufacturing and design constraints

- When designing your PCB, you need to make the PCB through a manufacturer. Each manufacturer has it's own limitations on how it can fabricate PCBs. These limits are why we need to define constraints for our board. With PCB Editor open, go to the constraint manager. You can find constraint manager from this small icon here called CMGR. Or, you can go to setup constraints. So, we need to set a number of rules. For electrical rules we don't need to set any of those right now. But what's very important is to set the physical rules. The minimum line width for our traces needs to be something like 0.254 millimeters. That's the same as 10 mils. The maximum line width is set to zero by default and what this means is infinite. So, any time you see zero, that means there's no maximum. The minimum neck width, we'll also set that to 2.54 millimeters. The reason for that is because 0.127 millimeters is 5 mils and most PCB fabrication companies will charge you extra if you under 8 mils or 6 mils…

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