We’ve made some improvements to the Power/Ground nets screen to make it easier to identify power and ground nets.

We recommend that the first thing you do after adding your board is to classify the power and ground nets on the boards. This will improve our ability to correctly suggest categorisations for your devices, in particular telling the difference between pull resistors and series resistors.

Previously, we used a regular expression to suggest power or ground nets based on their names. This worked well a lot of the time, but had some limitations. It would sometimes suggest nets like PWR_GOOD, which is not actually a power net. In some netlist formats the nets do not have descriptive names, which made our old approach not useful.

Now, in addition to suggesting matching names, we will also suggest nets that have a large number of capacitors on them. We cannot tell if they are power or ground, but by highlighting them at this stage it is straight forward for you to check them against the schematic – if you have added a searchable schematic to the project, we will take you directly to that net in our Schematic Viewer.

We will also suggest nets that are linked to an existing power or ground net by a resistor, fuse, inductor or ferrite bead. You do not need to categorise these components (in fact, we recommend you classify all the power and ground nets before you start categorising devices). We detect these 2-pin components automatically using another regular expression for the purpose of suggesting power/ground nets.

The regular expressions for the new device categorisations for fuses, inductors and ferrite beads can be edited in the Options dialog in XJDeveloper.