Long time EAGLE User? Learn how to optimize PCB performance in Fusion Electronics

Pieter.Jan.Van.de.Maele — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 18:56:10 GMT

Optimizing the raw performance of the application is always top of mind for our development team. While this is ever increasing, it is important to know that a number of new features, introduced to automate the design effort, could also have an impact on performance. While in the majority of cases, they will save time, there might be times where it makes sense to turn them off. In this post, we will go over the most important ones.

Live DRC

With live DRC enabled, rule violations are checked with every change to the design. This could be very beneficial to flag issues early, but in some cases these benefits might not outweigh the performance hit. To turn it off you can simply go to Preferences > Color to turn it off.

Obstacle Avoidance

Fusion Electronics has capabilities to avoid obstacles using walkaround or push/shove strategies. By default, push obstacles is enabled. In densely populated boards however, it might help to turn this off and use “ignore violators” instead. This option can be found in the mini-toolbar.

Automatic Copper Pour (Polygon) Re-pouring

Whenever copper pours are visible, they are automatically kept up to date. That means that while editing the board, polygons are being continuously re-poured. For big copper pours this could become a performance hog. It is recommended to do most editing with polygons invisible. You can easily hide all copper pours with the “Hide all Polygon Pour fills” option in the toolbar.

Automatic Recognition of the board-shape

Fusion automatically recognizes the board shape based on the geometry drawn on the dimension layer (Layer 20). This is very useful for working between Electrical and Mechanical context. However for very complex board shapes or currently un-supported multi-board designs, this could become a bottleneck. This option can be turned off in the Electronics Preferences.

Moving while preserving angles

By default, when moving anything in the PCB workspace, Fusion will maintain the connections and the angles at which those were made. This way, edits can be very quickly made without introducing a bunch of re-work. However, for large do-over move operations, this could be unnecessary effort. To turn this option off, check out the “move mode” in the MOVE command dialog. Note that this setting also affects other commands that execute a move, like the ALIGN command.

Hopefully that helps to get the most out of Fusion Electronics! Please comment if there is anything that was missed.

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Long time EAGLE User? Learn how to optimize PCB performance in Fusion Electronics