Isolated Copper Pours within a larger Copper Pour

Layout
1

I have an unusual issue for which I am unable to resolve.
I have a PCB with three nets and seven pins for an instrument,
Net “Anet” is the overall copper pour zone for the whole PCB.
Net “Bnet” is a sub net, as is net “Cnet”.
The PCB has three separate copper pour zones, Anet, encompasses the whole board, Bnet and Cnet are required to be isolated copper pour zones within the Anet zone.

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No matter if I create Anet zone first or last, it pours over the Bnet and Cnet zones with no clearance between the zones.

Am I missing something in the settings?

I usually work with Altium professionally but for this project the clients wish to use KiCAD.

Thanks for any assistance.

2

i think that you have to define a proper ‘zone priority level’ for that.

3

Yes, you can set this in the properties of a zone. Higher priority levels get filled first:

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Double plus good. :slight_smile: :grinning: :sunglasses:

As an alternative, you can work in altium, and then later import in KiCad and verify the design before finalizing it. KiCad’s importer works quite well. The other way around has more road bumps I think. From what I heard, altium wrote an importer for KiCad V6 (maybe V7?) and did not update it and it can’t read KiCad V8 files.

1 Like
4

Hi Claudio.

Thanks for the pointer. It fixed my issues. Hadn’t though of checking the Zone Priority setting.

Regards. Antonio Benci