Fabrication rules
Overview of Quilter’s fabrication rules, detailing how they define geometric constraints for manufacturability, guide candidate exploration, and ensure compliance with fabricator capabilities.
Overview
Fabrication rules are a subset of design rules that define the minimum geometric thresholds a fabricator can apply when manufacturing your circuit board.
Specifically, Quilter's fabrication rule profiles include the following:
Minimum trace width
Minimum trace clearance
Minimum drill hole size
Minimum annular ring size
Minimum edge-to-copper clearance
How Quilter uses fabrication rules
Quilter uses fabrication rules in two key ways:
1/ To explore the design's possibility space
When Quilter starts a layout job, it tests a range of candidates by starting with various stack-ups from different fabricators and applying a range of minimum fabrication rules. These rules span from very aggressive (as small as 3 mil trace widths) to more conservative (as large as 10 mil trace widths). This helps Quilter understand the fabrication ruleset that will achieve the best balance of completeness, manufacturability, and performance for your design. Complete candidates that pass all physics rule checks (PRCs) with the most conservative fabrication rules are automatically recommended for selection during the candidate review process.
2/ To ensure candidates are free of design issues
By defining fabrication rules against the minimum specifications for each of our fabricator partners, Quilter also ensures that each candidate can be successfully manufactured by that partner. Quilter's DRC engine performs design rule checks throughout the candidate generation process. A final ECAD-native DRC check is also run on each complete candidate before it's delivered to the Candidate Reviewer for final selection.
Pre-supported fabrication rules
Quilter's fabrication rules have been defined in partnership with top fabricators and can be bucketed into a few different groups:
"Extended" fabrication rules These design rule profiles are established based on our partners' minimum fabrication capabilities. They are typically only available with boards that have larger layer counts and often incur higher costs and longer lead times.
Example: Oshpark (5 mil traces), JLCPCB (3.5 mil traces), MacroFab (3 mil traces)
"Standard" fabrication rules These design rule profiles are established based on minimum fabrication capabilities for "standard"-level services. They are more conservative and generally support lower-cost, quick-turn fabrication services and boards with fewer layers.
Example: Oshpark (6 mil traces), JLCPCB (5 mil traces), MacroFab (5 mil traces)
"Conservative" fabrication rules In most designs, it’s important to avoid designing to the minimum requirements. These fabrication rules are well-supported by all our fabrication partners. Quilter consistently recommends candidates with the most conservative fabrication rules that are also fully complete and contain 0 DRC or PRC (physics rule check) violations.
Example: 8 and 10 mil trace widths/clearances
Viewing fabrication rule details
At the top of the candidate reviewer, you'll see the fabrication rules used to generate your layout candidate.
How to specify
As a preference
Quilter provides customized fabrication profile setup and implementation as a service to all paying customers. Customers can collaborate with Quilter to create one or more custom fabrication profiles that use the stack-ups and fabrication rules that match their typical fabrication partners' capabilities.
As a requirement (soon)
Soon, you will be able to limit Quilter's exploration to a specific fabrication rule profile. You will achieve this by:
Specifying all of the required details for your fabrication rules in the input file you upload to Quilter
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