How to have tracks in distance I prefer?

My first PCB in KiCad 5.1.2.
I am connecting 22 lines to 0.5mm raster ZIF socket. Socket pads are 0.3mm so clearance here is 0.2mm.
To avoid errors in DRC I understand I have to set clearance to 0.2 (I set to 0.195 as I noticed that if 0.2 then I can’t go with two 0.2mm tracks under 0R haveing 1mm distance betwean pads (and I have such places at this PCB).
I use 0.25mm tracks and I would like to have separation betwean them 0.25mm. It is easy at the first segment just from socket but after first corner problems begin (because of clearance set to 0.195).
I was thinking that may be after routing I would be able to extend them by temporarily setting the clearance to 0.25 and then by hotkey ‘d’, but it don’t works if traces to be shoved are in closer distance than clearance.

Is there any method to extend already routed tracks (not one by one)?

I too had similar issue recently and the way I handled it was opposite of yours.
In my projects I like power rails to have bigger traces and clearance just for easy visual identification even when voltages and currents are small. But when it comes to routing those power nets to 0.5mm pitch ICs and connectors the increased clearance gets in the way.

So I set clearance to bigger value first, route everything I can and then set it to smaller value to get to places where drc wouldn’t allow me with prior settings. That way I get almost all of the board have clearance I want.

2 Likes

Seeing my problems I decided that next PCB I will do in that order. But here I had to start from the 0.5mm raster ZIF. It has fixed position, and even at whole PCB I have lot of space I was interested to place the microcontroller as close to it as possible to get some space for something (each mm counts). So I also had to go with tracks from ZIF and not to ZIF as the oposit elements had no right positions yet.
After finishing that tracks I changed clearance to bigger and I can’t decide myself if I prefere working in Highlight collisions or Shove mode. In Highlight collisions KiCad behaves as I’m used to (with my old Protel) but one of the reasons I began to be looking at KiCad was the Shove router.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.