How to run fat traces to skinny pads?

Question

(Hope I'm not duplicating this post, I clicked the link to get to Richard Hammerl)

I am a long time user of Eagle running 5.11.0 on Windows.

I just did my first board with fine pitch pads (0.5mm spacing). I had set up GND as a class with a 30 mil (0.76mm) trace. The autorouter would not connect to the GND pads on the fine pitch part, and the board was too complex for manual routing in the time I had.

I ended up making a special net called SKINNY-GND for the fine pitch part and connecting it to to real ground at 2 points.

What is the right way to handle fat traces going to skinny pads? Is there a way to tell the autorouter to do it?

Thanks for any advice,

Lloyd

Richard_H · Accepted Answer

Hi Lloyd,

what you could do is to manually route the part where you have to use small wires and let do the autorouter the rest. Start from the skinny pads with a small width until you are in an area where you can use bigger widths then. The autorouter will connect to the ends of the small wires.

Regards,
Richard