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If there is a lack of effective communication and communication between the project personnel, it is likely to produce several different versions of PCB design data, 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?
1. PCB Design 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.
2. Device sheet
In terms of module reuse, is there a way to make 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.
3. Multichannel design method
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, 16 channels of exactly the same circuit, imported into the PCB completely disrupted components, 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, as well as the completely consistent layout on the PCB. Let’s see how Alitum Designer uses multi-channel design to simplify the workload of engineers.
