As designs become more complex, it is necessary to partition the design into easily-manageable, logical sections in order to effectively manage the capture process. The Altium Designer schematic editor facilitates the capture of designs of any complexity by supporting a hierarchical approach to design. This allows you take both a top-down and bottom-up view of the overall circuit, and to easily break the design into functional blocks. There is no limit to the number of sheets that can be contained within a project, and the depth of hierarchy is unlimited.
Altium Designer provides easy navigation of the hierarchical constructs within the schematic project. You can, for example, automatically synchronize the connection ports on sheet symbols with the schematic subsheets they represent. You can navigate connectivity up and down the hierarchy and trace a single connection through the entire design.
Altium Designer’s hierarchical environment and extensive design navigation support help you bring order to the capture process and facilitate a structured approach to design capture.
Handling repeated circuit blocks
Many designs include extensive blocks of repeated circuitry. Cutting and pasting circuit segments achieves the overall design structure, but makes editing difficult. You need to make repeated edits to change the circuit or channel structure.
With Altium Designer you can handle repeated circuitry intelligently within the schematic hierarchy. You can reference a single subsheet multiple times by including a repeat parameter in the referencing sheet symbol. When you compile your project, Altium Designer will automatically instantiate the repeated blocks or channels programmatically. Because the hierarchy is maintained within the project throughout the capture process, you can edit the source schematic at any time and recompile to propagate the edits to all repeated blocks or change the number of repeated instances.
As you move through to board design, Altium Designer will automatically propagate channel instantiation through to the PCB layout. This allows you to layout one channel and then copy the placement and routing across the remaining channels.
Altium Designer’s intelligent handling of multi-channel designs minimizes unnecessary editing and maintains channel hierarchy and integrity throughout the design process, allowing you to efficiently construct repeated blocks of circuitry within a project.