I want to use a pair of high-speed BGA connector (ADM6-60-01.5-L-4-2-A-TR) for board-to-board connections. Each of these connectors has 240 pins and about half of them are power or ground connections to planes. I would like to make the fan-out vias for these power connections all look the same. Indeed, it would be nice to automate a regular fan-out pattern for all the pins of these connectors.
I find it impossible to create a regular fan-out pattern using unsteady mouse clicks. I am using KiCad 6.
How do you guys handle this situation? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
If you do it by hand, you could use a coarse grid with the correct spacing (probably half the grid of the pins, and make sure the pins align with the grid).
Those are a couple of good ideas. I’ve read that this plug-in is not yet compatible with KiCad 6 but I will at least give it a try. I’ve never used a KiCad plug-in before but I’m sure I can learn how to do it.
Shifting my design so that the connectors are on grid may not be possible. In the long direction the pads are spaced 25mils but in the other direction I cannot detect any round spacing, in mils or mm. I got the footprint from SnapEDA so it is probably right. Still, I should double check that ball spacing.
Years ago, I used PADS PCB to design boards. It had quite a good BGA fanout tool. You could select between several different styles and instantly see the results. It would be great if something like that could eventually become a core functionality of KiCad.
I tried that fanout plugin. It gives me an error saying to select the track width but the track width field is greyed out. Maybe the problem is that my BGA is a connector, not a square shape. Maybe the plugin is not compatible with KiCad 6. Maybe I don’t know what I am doing.
That’s probably a good idea, assuming they will answer . . . one thought I had, do you already have a track width defined for the board that would be suitable ?
I sent an email to the address listed for the github repository. We’ll see if they answer.
I also checked that my default track width and via size are defined for the project. They are defined to dimensions that would be suitable for fanout of a BGA, 5mils and 20 mils.
If anyone else has used this plugin with KiCad 6 I would like to know.
just as a notice here, this is not a problem, you still could use a custom grid to achieve the right spacing. you just need to set the origin and spacing so that they fit your footprint.
It is practical in kicad7, except that you have two non-metallized fixing holes in this connector, which will cause errors in the program, you can remove them, fan out and then replace them with the original footprint
