Hello,
I have a double sided SMD board. I have traces on one side that I’m trying to connect to traces on the other sided using a via. I used a via with a pad on top with the trace running to the middle of the via and got told by board manufacturer that that’s all sorts of wrong and I need a replace that getup with a plated via. I’m not sure how to do that.
That sounds like the way to do it, unless you mean you’re placing a pad over the via. Vias come with their own pads (view the Via layer, and note that it’s included in the top copper CAM job).
Manually placing vias should be fine, as long as they have the right signal name. However, an easier way to do it in EAGLE is to simply change the current layer while you’re routing the wires - EAGLE will place a via for you where the layer changes. I bound (Options>Assign) Alt-1 and Alt-2 to change between layers 1 (top) and 16 (bottom) so it’s easier to do while routing.
This is how my vias all worked in the double-sided SMD board [I recently had made at PCBexpress, and also in a smaller board I had made with a different manufacturer (Seeed) - both had no problems with my Gerber files and both came out as designed. I’ve attached the smaller board’s .brd and Gerber files in case you want to take a look.
Thanks a lot for the reply! Great info. I was googling this earlier and I saw people talking about “thermals” in reference to this topic; specifically, turning them off? I don’t quite understand that concept.