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Background

I often design PCBs by pre-placing certain hierarchical blocks first. I pre-place multiple ones of these then choose one of them and start wiring things up inside it, adding the necessary local power "puddles" etc. At this point all the other blocks are un-routed and (possibly) have tons of violations, but I'm not interested in those just yet. I only want to check if DRs are satisfied within just this one block I'm currently working on.

Question

Is it possible to run a DRC within a user-defined area of the PCB only? I.e. I'd like to run all DRCs, but not for the entire board, only a part of it. Anything outside this area should be ignored.

I'm not looking to create room-based rules -- this I know how to do. Instead, I'm trying to restrict the area (temporarily) in which the DRC is executed.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I agree with Sim Son. I am an Altium user but there's no way to tell the DRC to care only about a specific region of a PCB without utilizing rooms. \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Commented Apr 6, 2022 at 20:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ @JYelton I'm don't mind utilising a room as a means of restricting the DRC to the room only. But this would mean that I must recreate (duplicate) a ton of rules and just change their scoping to be applicable to the room only. There's no clever way of doing this, is there? \$\endgroup\$
    – pfabri
    Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 14:20
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    \$\begingroup\$ Unfortunately I don't think so. I examined the DRC setup to see if there was any sort of logic for if withinroom('x') then skip all remaining DRC but could not find any such mechanism. You'd have to modify basically every rule to have an additional truth condition that you could perhaps toggle with a project parameter. Not very convenient to say the least! \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 16:57

1 Answer 1

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I'm not an Altium user, but what you want is probably not possible as the DRC is based on the net information that is derived from the schematic. The DRC doesn't directly care about "areas of the PCB", i.e. "areas in the layout". You'd have to comment out those parts you're not interested in in the schematic and create a new netlist.

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