Design rules

Experiware checks your design against the process forming each layer and reports what it finds in the Problems panel. The report is live — recomputed on every committed edit — and it never blocks you. A design with errors still builds, still displays and still exports; the export dialog states how many are outstanding rather than refusing to run.

Rules are data

There is no fixed list of checks. Each process carries a rule deck: a table of rules, each with its own threshold and a severity of Error or Warning. Change a threshold in the Fab processes window and the report changes with it.

The consequence worth taking on board is that a rule the deck does not carry is not checked. Silence about the roof of a molded part means the molding process carries no roof rule, not that your roofs are fine. That is deliberate: a rigid molded part has no roof problem to state, and a placeholder threshold would be the opposite lie.

Which process governs

Every finding names the process whose deck set the limit — the one governing the layer the finding is on, which under a per-layer override is not the process you were last looking at. A row reading wall 3 µm < 8 µm min · film is telling you the film process set that 8.

What is checked

Min wall — a wall or gap between features thinner than the process holds, and features that overlap outright.
Min inner radius and Min outer radius — a corner formed below the process’s floor, measured at the radius it is actually formed at. A corner left sharp has a radius of 0 and is measured like any other.
Min roof — a roof thin enough to sag shut.
Max roof span and Max roof span ratio — an unsupported roof reaching further than the process allows, either as an absolute width or as a multiple of the roof’s own thickness.
Allowed depths — a depth the instrument cannot reach, authored as intervals.
Allowed depth increments — a layer that cannot be built from the sheet thicknesses available.
Max depths / layer — more distinct depths in one layer than the process forms in one go.
Max faces / layer — a layer opening from more faces than the process works. A through feature counts as both faces, since a through cut is worked from either side.
Fits extent — features running outside the working area, margin included, on a disc (a wafer) or a rectangle (a platen or a sheet).
Floating island — material fully enclosed by through-cut void, with nothing holding it.

What is not checked yet

The deck table lists every rule the app knows, and four of them you can set a threshold for without anything measuring against it:

Min feature — a void narrower than the process resolves.
Max aspect ratio — a feature deeper than its own width by more than the process holds.
Min aspect ratio — a feature far wider than it is deep.
Min secondary op spacing — two secondary operations, such as drilled ports, too close together.

Each wears a dim not checked yet note in the deck table, ticked or not. Where one of them is ticked on a process forming your design, the Problems panel repeats it under the report — so an empty report is never read as those four passing.

The first two are the ones to watch, because every process preset ships them enabled. A preset’s Min feature threshold is the real number for that process and worth reading, but the report says nothing about your narrowest features, in either direction. Measure those yourself.

The two checks outside the deck

Wall capability asks whether the process can form a wall kind at all, and it reads the process’s wall list rather than the deck. Its absence rule runs the other way round: an empty wall list allows nothing. It is always an error — a fab that cannot form a shape cannot form it at any threshold — and a kind left stale after a stack switch is reported rather than quietly changed.

Structural defects are always checked and are not configurable: an outline that crosses itself, a hole outside its region, a hole touching its region’s wall, compartments that overlap or that meet without sharing a whole wall. No process forms any of these, so there is no threshold to set and no entry to omit.

Geometry already flagged as defective is declined rather than measured. A hole that escaped its region would otherwise report a confident wall thickness that means nothing, so you get one row explaining the defect instead of two rows disagreeing about it.

Rows track edits, not occurrences

A pillar array at too tight a pitch is thousands of offending pairs and one edit. Every part of the report is built around that. A row says how many places it stands for rather than listing them, the viewport draws one marker per row, and hovering a row reveals its other occurrences.

Past ten rows the list folds into one group per rule kind, each header carrying its glyph, label and total (✕ Min wall · 37) and starting collapsed. At that scale the question is whether you are looking at one systemic thing or thirty separate ones, and the header answers it. Where a single rule accounts for nearly the whole of a large report, its header adds a question — 1240 of 1250 places — check the process? — because that concentration is usually one wrong process or a units slip rather than that many independent mistakes.

Nothing is capped and no count is hidden. Hovering a row lights its subject in the viewport; clicking one selects it, so the parameter that would fix it is one glance away. The zone title and the status bar both carry the running ✕ N · ⚠ M count.

Experiware Guide