Differential pairs, allocation of nets when GND or Vin are one of the connections

[niari]

Hi

I’m looking to use the differential pair routing facility for some sense resistor tracks on an SMPS PCB.

One end of one sense resistor is connected to Vin and an end of the other is connected to GND.

I understand that " Differential pairs in KiCad are defined as nets with a common base name and a positive and negative suffix."

I don’t see how I can allocate a differential base name to GND or Vin. These will be nets with completely different clearance, track width and via rules.

Can I not use differential routing in this situation or am I missing something?

Thanks.

[Piotr]

@niari

I don’t see how I can allocate a differential base name to GND or Vin.

Not sure what you need but probably you should use net-tie to connect your wire pair to Vin and GND, Then you can name these nets as you want.

[davidsrsb]

You want to create a 4 terminal resistor with Kelvin sense pins. KiCad allows you to create footprints with shorted pairs of pads. Then the sense lines can be routed back separately from any zones

[niari]

Thanks very much! I’ll get onto that tomorrow.

[niari]

@davidsrsb

Kelvin

Hi. I ended-up using a standard resistor and a couple of net-ties.

[paulvdh]

I marked your own post as the solution, because this is indeed the standard method for this.
In general, marking (the best fitting) post as the “Solution”, improves forum usability because people searching this forum for answers do not have to read the whole thread to see the best fitting answer (but they can read the whole thread for more background info if they wish of course).