#Altium designer protel 99se import update#
#Altium designer protel 99se import archive#
#Altium designer protel 99se import Pc#

The solution is something called a 'net tie' which is essentially a short-circuited component. It tries to run the same trace width the whole way. This is a bit of a PITA though, if you need to run a power line to the top of a current sense resistor and also a sense line to a little TSSOP comparator.

#Altium designer protel 99se import Pc#

There's a PC board rule directive available from the schematic so you can take a net and add a width requirement, for example, for power handling. Auto-route might be ok, but I don't use it.

#Altium designer protel 99se import update#

So when I update PC board from schematic I always find the line that says 'Add Room' and uncheck it.ДЄuto-place is hopeless, but no worse than any other CAD package I have tried. I don't use 'rooms' in my boards since they are pretty tight layouts and I just manually place everything.

When doing global editing, you need to remember that to get out of the selected parts, you need to 'Clear Filter', as opposed to the old Protel 99SE which had a separate 'global edit' feature that just went away when you were done. I always optimize my layouts of packs, so I find that a bit annoying. You need to edit the part once annotated and tell it to lock the subpart number after you annotate it. The schematic, PC board, and netlist entry is pretty decent, though 'annotate' has an annoying habit of wanting to re-order resistor packs and multi-part op-amps and stuff.

Now I grab the latest parts from the company database and graft them in at the end of the file. What I did was start with a copy of the company database, and massaged it. It still is 'your problem' to use a company database as that is still difficult. I do use the external database - you essentially make an XLS file that cross-references a PC board footprint, schematic symbol, simulation model (if you are using the simulation features), a 3D model, our internal part number, and a 'generic' part description.

#Altium designer protel 99se import archive#

But if I try to archive everything, I find that having all fifty different times we've built the same board but substituted a panasonic cap for the original nichicon.

Then *he* archives the build files but I don't have a record of it in the design file. In any case, I modify the variant, make the build files (pick+place, etc), then remove the part number substitutes if it's a 'this build'. Then when there are parts subs, the purchasing/manufacturing engineer sends me a list of part number subs and if the change is to be permanent or temporary. What I do is keep a build variant matched up for a feature set.

What we do, and I had to argue to do it because 'yet another build variant' seems too easy but it becomes way to hard to manage. But understand, if you do that, you'll have lots of build variants. Also if you are doing parts substitutions and using your internal part number, you can do that. It supports making multiple BOM's from one PC board - optional populations. We don't use FPGA's at all, and when I do need any kind of PLD, it's usually just an Atmel GAL chip (22V10 or 750C) and for those I just use CUPL which I'm familiar with. It does support VHDL design and that sort of thing, for FPGA's. If it's worth the $10k price, that's another matter. In the end, we do use it for simulations but it does have a lot of advantages over many other packages. We bought it initially to get simulations to work properly as the older version had issues.