altium designer 18 component source dialog box

You can create the project in an existing project folder, or as in this case, I created a new folder for my multi-board project. To work with multiple PCB designs in a single session in Altium Designer you must first create a multi-board project. Creating the Schematic in PCB Design Software for Multi Board As you can see in the picture above, I opened up the properties of the connector components and added a “System” parameter with the value of “Connector”. To do this you need to add a parameter to the connector components in your single board schematics in order to identify them as multi-board connectors. The first thing that you, as a PCB designer, have to do is to make sure that your single circuit board schematics are prepared for the multi-board schematic. My base design is named “Example_Design”, and I also made a copy of it where I changed the reference designators and some of the physical placement called “Example_Design2.”Īdding the multi-board connector property to a connector component in Altium Designer To demonstrate how this works, I am going to use a very simple example design with a simple 2 pin connector on it. Preparing for a Multi-Board AssemblyĪltium gives you the ability to verify the connectivity and fit of multiple system PCB layout with its multi-board functionality. Using Altium Designer ® lets me show you the basics of how this works. With the ability to bring in multiple PCB designs into the same design session, you can check for connectivity between the printed circuit board as well as check how they will mechanically fit together. Fortunately, PCB design tools today can offer a lot of help. With faster times to market and shrinking design budgets, using PCB prototype builds to test and verify system design is getting more difficult. Not only was it more to spread the design work around back then, but the only way to do system design was to create the boards individually and then test the prototypes together. And in all of those designs, none of them were ever from the same system. Years ago I designed boards at a service bureau where there were several different customers and the boards that I worked on were unique in size and function.

Altium designer 18 component source dialog box