NI Ultiboard 11.

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Ultiboard 11.0 ...................................................................................................................... 1 Placing footprints ............................................................................................................ 1 Laying traces .................................................................................................................... 1 Resize the board outline .................................................................................................. 2 Creating power plane ....................................................................................................... 2 Previewing the design in 3D ............................................................................................ 3 Exporting layout .............................................................................................................. 3 Verify export in Viewplot ................................................................................................. 4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 4
The purpose of this document is to keep a working record of weekly progress and activities done by the HiFi group, a subset of the Critical Tinkers group. Date: 2/16/2012

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Ultiboard 11.0
This section describes the process used to create a printed circuit board (PCB) in Ultiboard 11.0. The process includes positioning footprints, connecting footprints with copper traces and power planes, and exporting gerber files.

Placing footprints
1. In the upper left toolbar, set the selection filter to only allow part selections

2. In the Design Toolbox on the left column, select the layers tab. Unselect the Force Vectors from the Information group

3. Place the parts within the yellow board outline by click and holding on a part, then dragging it to the desired position 4. Position the parts such that the yellow lines extending from the footprint pins (these lines are called the rats nest) take the shortest path from one pin to the other 5. You can rotate the parts by pressing Ctrl+r when the part is selected 6. Positioned footprints may look like the following:

Laying traces
1. In the upper left toolbar, set the selection filter to only allow trace selections, and then select the Place a line function in the upper toolbar.

2. Lay traces that connect all the pins of the footprints except for the pins connected to ground. You can adjust the width of the traces by pressing Ctrl+Shift+w (wider) or Ctrl+Shift+n (narrower) while a trace is being laid.

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3. Your PCB should now look similar to the following (notice the pins connected to ground are not connected with any copper traces):

Resize the board outline

1. In the Design Toolbox on the left column, select the layers tab. 2. Double-click on the Board Outline layer in the PCB group

3. In the upper left toolbar, set the selection filter to only allow other objects selections

4. Zoom out in the design workspace and select the yellow board outline, and resize it accordingly. 5. The design may now look similar to the following:

Creating power plane

1. In the Design Toolbox on the left column, select the layers tab. 2. Double-click on the Copper Top layer in the PCB group 3. In the upper toolbar, select the Create a power plane function , a new window appears 4. In the Net field, select 0 (0 means that the plane associates itself with the net 0, or, ground)

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5.

In the Layer field, select Copper Top.

6. Notice that now all pins that are connected to ground are connected to the ground plane (power plane associated with ground), and all other pins and traces are not.

Previewing the design in 3D

1. Go to View > 3D Preview

Exporting layout
1. Go to File > Export 2. Click OK 3. There should be no design rule checker (DRC) errors, so the export window should appear. If there are DRC errors, attempt to fix them before exporting the design. 4. Double-click the Gerber RS-274X export setting and the Gerber Settings window should appear 5. Add the layers we have used to design the PCB, and leave all other settings as-is. Namely: a. Copper Top b. Board Outline c. Silkscreen Top d. Drill

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6. Press OK, the Gerber Settings window closes 7. In the Export Window, click Export 8. Save the gerber files to the working directory (directory where your Ultiboard project is saved). The save window will appear for every layer we selected (so, three) and will have the extension .gbr

Verify export in Viewplot

1. Open Viewplot (Default is C:\viewplot\viewplot.exe) 2. Go to File > Load Files 3. Browse to the directory where you saved the gerber files and select all three .gbr files and click Open 4. Click OK 5. Verify that the dimensions shown are the same as that laid out in Ultiboard

Conclusion
This tutorial discussed a method to import a netlist from NI Multisim 11.0 and properly design and export a corresponding PCB. Following tutorials will make use of the Protomat S62 to fabricate the PCB.