Looking for advice about duplicated layouts

Layout
1

I am working on a PCB that has 8 sections that are almost identical. The PCB layout for the 8 sections will be identical, but the values of the parts that go on the footprint are not identical. The board is designed to be reconfigurable, using many 0ohm resistors, and DNP’ing many of them to change the function of the circuit. So my schematic has 8 heirarchical sheets, with the same schematic, but different settings for DNP, passive values, and also uses symbols that break up a quad op amp package into individual units. I have placed all the parts on the board, and routed traces for one of these 8 sections. Because the chips I am using have multiple identical cells (I’m using quad op amps and a quad VCA chip) I have the layout of parts mirrored around the chip. In the below image, you can see the layout I have for 4 of these sections, with all 4 mirrored around the central chip.

Screenshot 2025-06-01 at 12.55.29 PM
Screenshot 2025-06-01 at 12.55.29 PM1410×912 133 KB

I am trying to figure out the best way to route the traces for these. The fact that they are mirrored on the x and y axes means I can’t just copy and paste the traces. I know the newest version of kicad has some sort of duplicate layout type functionality, but I don’t know if that will work in this situation, since the hierarchal sheets are not technically identical, along with the mirroring of the layout.

What would be y’all’s techniques for managing this kind of layout? I could just do every block individually by hand, but I would love some kind of quicker way to copy and paste the traces while being able to mirror them.

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Mirroring of tracks generally is not very useful in an EDA suite, because of limitatons of the physical world. the software can’t mirror an SOT-23 package, and thus, mirroring it’s footprint makes no sense. But I do agree that when you have a bunch of passives it dos make sense. And there is a pretty easy workaround.

  1. Select the tracks.
  2. Copy them to some unused area.
  3. Flip them to the other side of the PCB.
  4. Change the layer of those tracks back to the original layer. (Or Swap Layers if you have tracks on two layers).
  5. Grab the block by one of the track ends, and then move it to the corresponding pad.

How much time did you spend on placing those footprints? It’s probably easier if you do the tracks first, and then snap the footprints to the track ends. But once you got some experience, you can probably think of some variants yourself.

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