Still No Native PCB Panelization in Fusion 360?

[arantesee]

Hi,

I’ve been using EAGLE since 2012 and Fusion 360 Electronics since 2021. And ever since, there’s no easy or native way to panelize PCBs inside the software.

There are some workarounds, but all of them come with problems — especially component name conflicts. For example:

• In the first board I have R1,

• But when I copy the board for panelization, the next one renames it to R38, and so on.

As someone who works professionally with PCB development, this becomes a serious bottleneck. I often waste time or face frustration when preparing boards for production — and in the end, I usually have to ask the manufacturer to create the panel for me from the Gerber files, because I can’t do it properly inside Fusion.

This is a basic and essential feature that any modern PCB design tool should have.

Is there any official plan to add true panelization support to Fusion 360 Electronics? Or am I missing something and there’s already a proper way to do it? If so, I’d be more than happy to learn the correct method.

Thanks in advance!

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @arantesee ,

I hope you're doing well. So I'll add your comments to the existing tickets on panelization it's definitely something we want to do but it has to be prioritized and as you can tell that hasn't happened yet.

In the meantime, there is a workaround to getting a panel made in Fusion and it's essentially the same one we used in EAGLE.

1) Create a new board, you want to make the panel independent of the original board file.

2) Using the insert 2D PCB bring in the first copy of your layout

3) Run the Panelize.ulp, this will copy all the reference designators to a new text layer as just plain text.

4) Go into Preferences > Electronics and uncheck the detect board shape feature. This feature can mess with the outline recognition when you have multiple board outlines in one file.

5) Now you can copy and paste the layout for as many copies as you need.

6) Add in any additional features on custom user layers (vscore lines for example)

When you go to export the gerbers for the panel, you have to change the layers in the silkscreen layers to use the ones created by the panelize.ulp. This is how you work around the reference designators incrementing with every copy, the reference designators created by the panelize.ulp will not increment. This allows all the copies to have the same set of reference designators.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[arantesee]

Thank you very much for your quick and accurate response. The method you taught actually worked, and I really appreciate your explanation.

I also agree with you — having this functionality natively, as in other programs, is essential. It would make our daily work much easier.