I’ve designed this board up with a ground plane on the top copper layer, generated using Proteus Ares. For some reason the DRCbot keeps hilighting my ground plane as violating 8mil 8 spacing - even though the tracks it uses are at least 10mil and with a 15mil clearance.
I’ve emailed support@, but has anyone had a similar sort of problem before?
http://i42.tinypic.com/16m4ug5_th.png](http://i42.tinypic.com/16m4ug5.png)
naxxtor:
I’ve designed this board up with a ground plane on the top copper layer, generated using Proteus Ares. For some reason the DRCbot keeps hilighting my ground plane as violating 8mil 8 spacing - even though the tracks it uses are at least 10mil and with a 15mil clearance.I’ve emailed support@, but has anyone had a similar sort of problem before?
http://i42.tinypic.com/16m4ug5_th.png[/quote]
Maybe it doesn’t like your thermals? They look fairly thin.](http://i42.tinypic.com/16m4ug5.png)
I’ve set them to be 10mil - any bigger than that and they’d be pointless …
Also, its not hilighted them in orange - not that that really means much.
Perhaps the copper fill is done with very narrow “tracks”.
Leon
I think the issue is at the lower left. Four holes in a square, upper right corner of this square, where ground plane almost disapppears. It looks thinner than 8 mil.
Well, it shouldn’t be. I’ve set the track width on the plane to be 10mil spacing - that said I’m not sure how it actually generates the ground plane in the gerbers.
Having a look with gerbv, I get this:
G code statistics
G0 = 0 (Move)
G1 = 0 (1X linear interpolation)
G2 = 0 (CW interpolation)
G3 = 0 (CCW interpolation)
G4 = 1 (Ignore block)
G10 = 0 (10X linear interpolation)
G11 = 0 (0.1X linear interpolation)
G12 = 0 (0.01X linear interpolation)
G36 = 0 (Poly fill on)
G37 = 0 (Poly fill off)
G54 = 31 (Tool prepare)
G55 = 0 (Flash prepare)
G70 = 0 (Units = inches)
G71 = 0 (Units = mm)
G74 = 0 (Disable 360 circ. interpolation)
G75 = 0 (Enable 360 circ. interpolation)
G90 = 0 (Absolute units)
G91 = 0 (Incremental units)
Unknown G codes = 0
The fact there are no G36 or G37 codes suggests that maybe the ground plane isn’t a poly - but then I don’t know how most software does ground planes so I couldn’t be sure.
felis:
I think the issue is at the lower left. Four holes in a square, upper right corner of this square, where ground plane almost disapppears. It looks thinner than 8 mil.
Oooh, that sounds probable. I’ll tweak that and see what happens.
I hope it’s not the space between the 0805 components that’s doing it, because that’d be exceptionally annoying to fix >_<
After some considerable tweaking, still fails 
I don’t know, the ground plane still goes between some of those solder pads and looks thinner than those 10mill traces. Like at the bottom it looks like two LED/resistor combos. There’s small ground plane tracing between. I’m not certain if the DRC takes just what has been marked as orange into consideration, or if it also includes the green trim.
Oh! I see now. That’s annoying, I couldn’t see those in Ares. Hopefully turning the clearance up to 18th should get rid of those.
Alas, no 
Ah, got an email today - apparently my ground plane is made up of lots and lots of very small appature traces, and DRCbot doesn’t like it.
So my original design got passed 
Yay.
Cool, thanks for updating this post.
I had the same problem with my board, Using KICAD.
I had to remove the ground plane in order for the DRC bot to accept it.
Wasn’t a mission critical board, so i figured it could go without it.
