First, we will look at the process of creating a negative or “Internal” plane. In Altium Designer, you can create your planes either as a negative (Internal) plane or as a positive plane (Polygon Pour). Using an Internal Plane in Creating a Ground Plane Once your nets are correctly named, you are ready to synchronize your schematic and layout to begin working with your power and Altium ground planes. The advantage of the power port is that it will connect across all sheets of your schematic without having to attach an off-sheet connector to a named net. In Altium Designer’s schematic editor, you can either assign a net name to a net, as pictured below, or attach a power port to the net as you see on the right side. This means that you have assigned the right net names so that all of your power and reference planes can be created correctly in layout. Make Sure that Your Schematic Nets are Correctīefore you create your ground or voltage planes in layout, you will want to make sure that your schematic is set up correctly. Let me show you how to make a ground plane in Altium Designer. This PCB design system does a great job of enabling you to create the planes that you need. Any CAD system can do this, but some are better at it than others. You have the choice of creating a ground plane that is either a positive copper fill or a negative plane depending on what your needs are. Now instead of being driven by the limitations of those older CAD systems, you can drive the design tools to create the plane layers the way you want them to be. The most you would see in them would be some “X’s” where there was supposed to be a connection for a thru-hole pin or via that connected to that plane. The old CAD systems didn’t really have the ability to do much with Altium power planes except to designate layers as a bottom layer or the like.

This meant that they were usually six-layer multi-layer boards, with a ground plane and a VCC plane. It used to be that printed circuit boards seemed to have the same basic layer configuration, or at least that’s the way I tend to remember it.

Altium schematic to pcb