If there is a lack of effective communication between the PCB designers of the project, it is likely to produce several different versions of PCB design data, and there may be many repeated designs among team members. If different versions of design data can not share the same standard and format, it will inevitably cause communication barriers and management difficulties among members. Repetitive design and labor will reduce the efficiency of the whole team. If these problems can not be foreseen and avoided in advance, it will take more time and energy to solve the problems when there are conflicts in the later stage of design. In this way, the operation of the whole team will not only affect the efficiency, but also the R & D cycle and budget of the project.

At this time, the question in front of us is: how to save the design results that have been verified as successful, and reuse them for future design or other members of the team, so as to avoid repeated design? How to design the same circuit structure quickly? How to make each member of the team fully cooperate and have the same standards and templates to manage data? How to make team managers fully understand and control the overall situation?

Snippet (snippet)

As a conscientious electronic engineer, you must have designed many circuits in your PCB design career. We must have accumulated a lot of PCB design modules that have been successfully verified. And these successful partial designs are likely to be used again in other similar products or projects of the same series. Including its schematic and PCB. Is there a simple way to save these design parts and reuse them easily in other designs instead of doing the same work over and over again? Or do other colleagues in the same team need to use this part of the design, and directly copy and paste your saved design results instead of designing from scratch?

Altium designer provides such a function as snnipet. Save the design fragment in a folder, and then copy the ready-made schematic design and PCB design fragment to your own project as easily as copy fragment. The advantage of this method is that you can not only easily copy the existing design, but also make adjustments and changes to the copied design fragments. For example, make some changes to some wiring, replace some components and so on.

The reuse of design fragments is the unique advantage of Altium designer, a unified design platform. In a design environment with multi clock design software switching, because the design data follow different structures, it is not feasible to use simple fragment replication method.

Device sheet

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

Don't worry. This is what Altium designer's device sheet is for! There are many mature design modules in the software, and the schematic diagrams of these design modules are made into device sheet for you to call freely like a component. As shown in the figure below. This schematic is flash_ S29GL256N11FFIV10_ 16mx16 (shown in the upper right corner) is made into a device sheet (green block diagram in the upper right, loop flag indicates reusable). Then, the device type schematic diagram is called by multiple projects like using components (put it in the upper layer schematic diagram, and the sub schematic diagram of the device sheet will appear after compilation). Two different design projects calling 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. You just need to save it as a device sheet and call it at will.

In addition to the various device sheets provided by the software itself, engineers can also make device type schematic diagrams from their own works or design modules that may be reused in the future. Save it in the designated location, which is convenient for you to call it or share it with other people in need. Give people roses and keep the aftertaste.

Multichannel design method

In design, it is often necessary to reuse the same schematic diagram in different positions. For example, as like as two peas, the same kind of driving circuit (the same circuit structure and components) is needed to maintain consistency in the 6 way fuel injection system. As like as two peas, a centralized control unit is exactly the same as the control circuit of multiple control terminals. In this case, we do not need to copy and paste the same duplicate schematic for each channel. Because this copy and paste in the schematic is relatively clear, but to the PCB layout and wiring stage is a mess, can not guarantee that each channel has the same layout structure and wiring. And these small differences will also affect the execution effect or timing problems. As like as two peas, the same circuit is imported into the PCB to completely disrupt the components. How can I find them one by one and put them in the place where they should be placed? It's too troublesome!

Therefore, this multi-channel design (reuse of the same schematic) must ensure that the schematic is clear and legible, and the PCB layout is completely consistent. Let's see how alitum designer applies multi-channel design to simplify the workload of engineers.

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

Import data from schematic to PCB. Five rooms will be generated, and the circuit frames of five schematic diagrams will be placed in five different rooms. As shown in the figure below. Layout and route one of the channels. As shown in the figure below, the fan-shaped room on the right and above has been laid out.

As like as two peas, the 5 Room is transformed into the same layout and fan structure by using the function of Copy Room Format. Then the layout and wiring of the five channels are put together according to the circular polar coordinates to form a circle. As shown in the figure below. This method ensures great convenience in the PCB layout stage, and will not make mistakes.

All kinds of design templates maintain the standard consistency (template)