Hi,
Is anyone aware of any limitations built into KiCAD about the maximum number of pins, pads or nets that can be incorporated into a design? I’ve read in the docs that layers and board size are unlimited, but no data on pins. I’ve done PCBs before that have almost 4000 pins so am worried that this could become an issue some time.
Thanks,
Michael
My boards are small so don’t take my word for it but I think most of the limitations come from licensing schemes and not software design. I’ve been on the list for maybe 6 months and I don’t remember this ever being an issue. If you want to do a quick check you could make a massive part using grid array and see if the software chokes?
I am pretty sure there are no limitations in kicad. (At least one by design.)
As @hermit implied there might arise problems because of software performance. (Might depend on your hardware.)
There are no artificially imposed limits that I am aware of (which would only be done for performance reasons).
Clearly, there are limits imposed by the software design, e.g I think board size is limited to around 2m x 2m, and there are up to 32 copper layers.
I guess that collections of objects such as pads or nets may be limited to 2^31 members, which is effectively unlimited.
For testing I created a schematic containing 300 2x50 connectors, i.e. the design has 15000 pins. During annotation and netlist creation I noticed a serious lag compared to my normal use (mostly <1000 pins). Import into the layout also took considerably more time.
Attached is the archived project file, have fun!
limit_test_15000_pins.zip (163.3 KB)
Edited to add:
By “serious lag” I mean the response time has gone from “unnoticeable” to “a few seconds” on my production machine (Kicad 4.0.7 on Debian 9, Core i7 / 3.4 GHz, 32GB RAM).
Thank you very much everyone for your suggestions, and for the demo project @ikletti! I’ll have a look at that, but it looks like pins shouldn’t be a problem in that case, I can live with a bit of lag when things get really big 