How PCB Library Organization Expands Design Capabilities

A popular children’s cartoon featured a superhero called the “Masked Retriever” who had a real job as an ordinary librarian. In the pursuit of justice, the Masked Retriever left a bold checkmark as a calling card and pursued anyone with an overdue book. In one animated adventure, the Masked Retriever pursued the most powerful man in the region by horseback because he wouldn’t give up his book.

Unlike the of the Masked Retriever, PCB libraries don’t require superhero actions or drastic moves to recover overdue items. In the PCB world, component and schematic libraries are essential tools in expanding PCB design capabilities to build customized approaches. Here, success depends on pursuing innovation while maintaining a very organized and centralized approach using PCB folders.

Know the PCB Layout of the Land

From a very generic perspective, every component and schematic calls for organization. Altium organizes its libraries within four categories:

This organized approach connects schematic symbols with PCB layouts. Every symbol or icon represents a part by showing a flat, visual picture of the component. Footprints show the physical configuration, orientation, and size of the part as well as the pads that interconnect to the board.

When working with Altium, you can use the project tab to list libraries that contribute to the active project. Then, you can use components, footprint models, circuit simulation, signal integrity analysis models, and other models from available libraries that:

• Belong to the active project currently selected in the Projects panel;
• Have been installed; and
• Are available on a defined project-specific search path.

The schematic component symbols created within schematic libraries reference footprints and other models defined in separate footprint libraries and model files. As you build your component parameters, the symbols divide into two categories, with the first representing IEEE (United States) standards and the second tied to IEC (European) standards. No matter the type of component, every symbol has a name that indicates the sequential use of the part in a circuit—such as R10—and a value.

Altium allows you to place your components in discrete component libraries. It also enables you to compile symbol libraries, footprint libraries, and model files into portable, integrated libraries. You can browse the contents of those libraries in the Libraries panel and create a schematic of all components placed in a schematic document of your active project that includes pin, pads, and other criteria.

How to Care for Your Management

In the past, folders provided the organized approach for holding components and schematics. Saving a PCB design project involved giving your design a meaningful name and storing the design on your local drive, an external drive, or a flash drive. You could then use search paths to define a specific file or folder and sub-folders. The search paths allowed the compiler to automatically detect libraries as you added them to the folder.

A unified component system will be vital for maintaining your design data

Working with folders required a very hierarchical perspective that required a root folder, a project folder, a folder that held schematic libraries, footprint libraries, and multiple folders for snippets. Certainly, we can use search paths defined to a folder, sub-folders, or a specific file.

While this traditional method worked, searching a large number of folders that may contain hundreds, if not thousands, of files, becomes a very time-consuming and software-intensive task. In addition, the search path/folder method depends on the quality of model links that can become broken with the renaming of a folder.

Management Transfers to Strong Bills of Materials

Ultimately, the Masked Retriever captured the overdue book but then relented because the culprit hadn’t finished reading the story. Similarly, Altium allows you to finish your PCB design story by compiling an integrated.

Going back to the chart that we viewed earlier, the term “integrated” is visible under the installed and project tabs. This indicates that the integrated includes all and model files. With this approach, Altium places all component information into a single portable file. As you work on a project, you only need to access or move one file when working on or moving from one workstation to another. Compiling your schematic libraries in the integrated guarantees that source components will map to target models and has correct pin mappings.

A bill of materials will guarantee your organization transfers to manufacturing output organization

All this organization clears the clutter generally involved in folder management. In addition, the integrated approach offers document control, project security, and process control. In the end, the integrated gives the same peace-of-mind offered by the Masked Retriever who never lost a book.

With a smart Bill of Materials tool in Altium can make getting organized with both your internal design data and component information management and your external BOMs and Gerber Files a breeze. Consider getting your team situated in a unified design environment with the strongest PCB design software available.

Want to learn more about optimizing your design process with organized PCB libraries? Talk to an expert at Altium.