Smart Interactive Routing is Altium Designer’s new intelligent interactive routing system. Smart Interactive Routing works with you in an intuitive way, attempting to completely route the chosen connection along the shortest path, using horizontal, vertical and diagonal segments, while automatically walking around any obstacle along the path. Smart Interactive Routing will automatically complete the entire connection if both the start and end nodes are on the same layer, while maintaining any applicable design rules.

Since Smart Routing is an interactive routing tool you control the behavior using the cursor and the built-in shortcuts. It has 2 basic modes of operation, an auto complete mode where it will attempt to find a path for the entire connection, and auto-complete off, where it will attempt to route up to the current cursor location.

With auto complete on the segments up to the cursor are shown as solid and will place when you click, while the segments beyond the cursor are proposed, and are shown as dashed outlines. If you like the proposed path then simply hold Ctrl as you click, and the entire connection is routed!

If you prefer to use it in a route-to-cursor type mode, simply press 5 to toggle auto complete off and the Smart Interactive Router will seek out a path from the connection start point up to the cursor, walking around obstacles along the way.

As well as walking around obstacles to avoid conflicting with them, you can instruct it to stop at the first conflict, or ignore conflicts – press Shift+R to cycle through the modes. To select another connection leaving the pad you are routing from press the 7 shortcut. Press the Spacebar to change the corner mode.