Working with the Short-Circuit Design Rule on a PCB in Altium Designer
Created: February 22, 2016 | Updated: April 11, 2017
| Applies to versions: 16.0, 16.1, 17.0 and 17.1
Now reading version 17. For the latest, read: Working with the Short-Circuit Design Rule on a PCB in Altium Designer for version 21
Rule category: Electrical
Rule classification: Binary
Summary
This rule tests for short circuits between primitive objects on the copper (signal and plane) layers. A short circuit exists when two objects that have different net names touch.
Constraints
Default constraints for the Short-Circuit rule.
- Allow Short Circuit – defines whether the target nets falling under the two scopes (full queries) of the rule can be short-circuited or not. If you require two different nets to be shorted together, for example when connecting two ground systems within a design, ensure that this option is enabled.
How Duplicate Rule Contentions are Resolved
All rules are resolved by the priority setting. The system goes through the rules from highest to lowest priority and picks the first one whose scope expressions match the objects being checked.
Rule Application
Online DRC, Batch DRC and during autorouting.