I have a design ready which I can send it to the fab house for manufacturing. There are a few things not so clear to me. I would like to ask for some answers to command questions
I have a four layer PCB where the second and third layers are for GND and POWER respectively.
The question I have is that I saw some videos online where each ground pad is connected to the GND plane via a free standing via. But there is a possibility to add a front copper pour with GND signal.
Which one out of these two is recommended?
Also how can I make sure that the GND layer is connected to the ground signal?
Both. Generally, GND pads especially for decoupling capacitors and ICs benefit from a good ground connection. Which means they should have a via to the main GND plane as near as possible to the pad. If you additionally have a front-fill connecting it to GND, good, but a via still creates a better connection and you need vias anyway to connect the front-fill to the GND plane.
Vias, obviously, usually lots of them if you need a good connection. This is called via stitching.
For me the shortest possible connection to solid GND layer is mandatory.
If you gave to it GND net and KiCad filled the zone and you got not DRC errors than I think it is not possible for that layer to be not connected to GND.
So here is what I have done based on the suggestions I have got.
I first did via stitching to GND layer. Then connected most of the GND pads to ground.
Then I filled the top copper layer with ground pour. Still there were some regions/pad which were not connected to ground. This was because it was not possible to put some free standing vias on that regions. So, I did routing inside a ground layer as shown in green line.
Could there be a good way than this to do this task?
