If there is a lack of effective communication and communication between the PCB designers of the project, it is likely that several different versions of PCB design data will be generated, and there may also be numerous duplicate designs among team members. If different design data versions cannot share a unified standard and format, it will inevitably cause communication barriers and management difficulties between members. Repetitive design and labor will inevitably reduce the efficiency of the entire team. If these problems cannot be predicted in advance and methods are adopted to avoid them, when conflicts arise in the later stages of the design, more time and energy are often required to solve the problems. In this way, while the operation of the entire team affects efficiency, it is also likely to affect the project's R&D cycle and budget.

The question before us at this time is: How to save the design results that have been verified as successful, and reuse the design for future designs or other team members, and avoid duplication of design? How to ingeniously carry out the rapid design of multiple circuits with the same circuit structure? How to enable each member of the team to fully collaborate and have the same standards and templates to manage data? How to let team managers fully understand and control the overall situation?

Design snippet (Snippet)

As a diligent and conscientious electronic engineer, you must have designed a lot of circuits in your PCB design career. It must have accumulated a lot of proven successful PCB design modules. Some of these successful designs are likely to be reused in other similar products or projects of the same series. Including its schematic diagram and PCB. Is there a simple way to save these design parts and easily reuse them in other designs without having to do the same work over and over again? Or other colleagues in the same team need to use this part of the design, instead of designing from scratch, just copy and paste your saved design results?

Altium Designer provides such a function, design fragments (Snnipet). Save the design fragments in a folder, and then easily copy the ready-made schematic design and PCB design fragments to your own project just like copying the fragments. The advantage of this method, in addition to allowing you to easily copy the ready-made design, you can also make your own adjustments and changes to the copied design fragments. For example, make some changes to certain wiring, replace certain components and so on.

The reuse of design fragments is a unique benefit of Altium Designer's unified design platform. If in a multi-clock design software switching design environment, because the design data follows a different structure, a simple fragment copy method will not work.

Device sheet

In terms of module reuse, is there a way to take the circuit diagrams I often use as a whole and call them everywhere like a component? Can also be called by different designers in different projects?

Don't worry, this is what Altium Designer's Device Sheet does! The software comes with many, many mature design modules, and the schematic diagrams of these design modules are made into a Device Sheet for you to call at will like a component. As shown below. This schematic FLASH_S29GL256N11FFIV10_16Mx16 (shown in the upper right corner) has been made into a Device Sheet (the green block diagram on the upper right, and the cycle symbol indicates reusability). Then this device schematic is called by multiple projects like using components (put it on the upper level of the schematic and compile the sub-schematics of this Device Sheet to appear). The two different design projects that call this Device Sheet are NB2DSK.PRJPCB and

DaughterBoard.PRJPCB. In this way, it becomes very simple for different members of a team to reuse the same schematic module. Just save it as a Device Sheet and you can call it at will.

For device-based schematics, in addition to the rich and diverse Device Sheet provided by the software itself, engineers themselves can also make device-based schematics with their own works or design modules that may be reused in the future. Save it in the location you specify, so you can call it by yourself, or share it with others in need. Give someone a rose, take in the fragrance.

Multichannel design method (Multichannel)

In the design, there is usually a need to reuse the same schematic in different locations. For example, the high-pressure common rail electronic control fuel injection system or electronic control fuel injector in the marine industry needs to adopt the same drive circuit (the same circuit structure and components) for the 6-way fuel injection system to maintain drive consistency. Or a certain centralized control unit has exactly the same control circuits for multiple control terminals. In this case, we don't need to copy and paste the same duplicate schematic for each channel. Because this copy and paste is relatively clear in the schematic, but it is a mess at the PCB layout stage, and it is impossible to guarantee that each channel has the same layout structure and wiring situation. And these small differences can also affect the execution effect or timing issues. As shown in the figure below, there are 16 components with exactly the same circuit that are imported into the PCB and completely disrupted. How can I find them one by one and put them where they should be? too troublesome!

Therefore, this kind of multi-channel design (reusing the same schematic) must ensure that the schematic is clear and recognizable, and the layout and routing on the PCB are completely consistent. Let's see how Alitum Designer uses multi-channel design to simplify the workload of engineers.

For example, the schematic on the left of the figure below needs to be reused 5 times, that is, 5 channels. Then first generate the top block diagram of these 5 channels, and repeat 5 layers of overlay.

Import data from the schematic to the PCB. 5 rooms will be generated, and the circuit frames of 5 schematic diagrams will be placed in 5 different rooms. As shown below. Place and route one of the channels. As shown on the right side of the figure below, the fan-shaped Room at the top has been placed and routed.

Then use the Copy Room Format function to turn the 5 rooms into exactly the same layout and sector structure. Then put the layout and routing of these 5 channels together according to circular polar coordinates to form a circle. As shown below. This method ensures great convenience in the PCB layout and routing stage, and no errors.

Various design templates maintain standard uniformity (Template)

PCB design

Schematic template

If the circuit diagram of a PCB design project is more complex and large, it is usually not possible to stack all the designs on the same schematic diagram. The circuit will be divided into several sub-circuit modules, and each sub-circuit module will be marked with the corresponding title bar, general function, and so on. Generally speaking, for a complete and beautiful design, when others read your electroplating diagram, they can understand the overall basic situation of the circuit from the title bar of your drawing and the connection structure of related modules at a glance. Therefore, the title bar and author information on each schematic diagram, especially when different designers each design a drawing, the title bar and related description information must be unified standards, so as not to cause various different styles. confusion. Then the design and application of the schematic template is particularly demanding in the case of such large-scale projects and teamwork.

Because it is a military-industrial institute, the title bar also contains special requirements such as name, material, confidentiality level, etc., as well as hierarchical approval and filing procedures for design, proofreading, review, standard inspection, and verification, in addition to general commonly used information. Finally, for the unity of the design, the same title bar was designed for different paper sizes to facilitate the management and filing of the design data.

2. PCB design template

In terms of PCB design, if there are several boards of the same series, and the size, interface layout, and installation positioning holes have been determined not to be changed, they need to be made into a PCB template. Every time a new design is made in the future, the schematic diagram will be directly imported into this PCB design template, saving a lot of board shape design, peripheral layout design, and the design of the installation and positioning part. Apply energy directly to the design change itself. Significantly save unnecessary duplication of labor, and will not go wrong.

3. BOM template

Information construction has become the only way for modern enterprises to quickly improve their core competitiveness and achieve leapfrog development. Today, enterprises no longer pursue the informatization of single-point and partial application methods, but increasingly value the overall informatization of application integration, process optimization and information sharing.

In enterprises, BOM (Bill of Materials) runs through the entire ecological process of product conceptual design, detailed design, process planning, prototype trial production, processing and manufacturing, sales and maintenance until the demise of the product. With the advancement of enterprise information construction, BOM has become the core of enterprise product data management and the foundation and bridge for data integration between various application information systems. BOM management has become the main content of enterprise engineering informatization and management informatization.

In life cycle management, BOM runs through the beginning and end of the entire life cycle. From BOM provision, BOM management, to BOM use are inseparable. In Altium Designer, BOM also runs through the entire process from the conceptual design of electronic products to the final manufacturing, sales and maintenance.

Altium Designer provides circuit design BOM, and can import structural step parts, and can change and manage the BOM during the design process. When the design is completed, when electronic product processing and manufacturing, component procurement, and product assembly are carried out, there are process BOM, procurement BOM, manufacturing and assembly BOM information respectively. Play an important role in the entire product life cycle.

Therefore, the templates for BOM are also very rich.

Altium Designer's BOM template data source can collect a full range of information, and there are N types of output templates (used for purchasing, manufacturing, assembly, review, etc.). The file format is also rich and diverse.

And for each BOM template file, which column information needs to be captured and which content can be configured and changed by itself. You can find the source BOM template file (in the Template folder of the installation directory), and configure the captured data column. Finally output the BOM information for different purposes that you need in mind.