Learn more about AD. What role does AD play in the PCB industry?
AD, that is, Altium Designer software. For friends in the electronics field, AD is a relatively familiar software. But in order to continue to enhance everyone’s understanding of AD, this article will take a look at how AD solves various industry challenges in PCB design. If you are interested in AD, you may wish to continue reading with the editor.
With the extension of product time to market and the continuous decrease in product complexity, product customization is becoming more and more popular with customer needs. By changing the baseline product, new products can address different markets and requirements.
With the powerful variant management capabilities in AltiumDesigner®, product changes can be managed to keep all versions synchronized during the product life cycle. Variants can increase the temperature range by replacing parts, or replace or omit parts to meet different market needs, such as different power supplies or smaller displays. Product variations are managed in the complete product workflow, from schematic design to assembly manufacturing, to synchronize this variant in a complete project.
Continue to understand the problems designers encounter when using design variants, and how Altium Designer can help solve these challenges with the most advanced features at different design stages.
1.Why do you need to consider design variations?
Suppose you are developing a PCB for a smartwatch with three different memory variations (4, 8 and 16 GB). This watch should target different markets based on the variation in hardware requirements.
The traditional approach is to design three different PCBs based on different hardware requirements and vary the parameter information to meet market demands. However, with the complexity of today’s circuits and PCBs, this approach will delay time to market and will increase costs.
A better solution is to create a single base design and define the variations in it by configuring components and their parameters.
A single reference design for all variations, rather than creating new variations from scratch, allows designs to be completed faster and at lower costs. However, companies often have global teams responsible for a single project, so changes in one part of a product may lead to errors and unsynchronized changes in another product during the product lifecycle. Altium Designer can automatically synchronize workflows.
II. Design Variants and Industry Challenges
How big of a challenge is design variant management in the industry? In a recent survey by the Hong Kong Group, “The Importance of Configuration Management in Industrial Equipment Manufacturing,” 47% responded: “Market demand for customized and complex products is one of the biggest pressures facing product development.”
In another survey, “PCB Design: Improving Profitability with PCB Design Best Practices,” 44% of respondents found that: “Frequent design changes are one of the main challenges in PCB design, leading to delays and increased project costs if not managed properly.
These challenges become critical during the production phase when you send production files to manufacturers, as any data inaccuracies can lead to product failures. To effectively handle these changes, it is important to manage them throughout the product lifecycle. During the PCB design cycle, these changes are done at the schematic or PCB level and synchronized with production data. Keeping production files such as BOM and assembly outputs up-to-date for all design variants requires a managed workflow. This is even more important if multiple participants are involved in the design to ensure a consistent workflow. Any miscommunication during the product design process can lead to poor design quality, rising costs, and longer time to market.
III. Different Management
AlTIum Designer provides you with a powerful centralized variant management system. You can define any number of variations of a base design, then manage component parameters and configure components as mounted, unmounted, or alternate parts. Since these variations share the same bare board and only have an impact on the assembly process, we call these variant combinations variants. In the following chapters, you will see how variant management in Altium Designer can coordinate design changes without affecting synchronization in different design steps.
Centralized Variation Configuration
The key to using variants in any design is centralized management. In Altium Designer, this unique feature is integrated to improve synchronization between different design stages. In this single variant management dialog box, you can define new variants as well as edit component parameters, allowing Altium Designer to automatically handle synchronization between schematics, PCBs, and output files. To further support alternate components from different sources, the functionality is extended to independent libraries, database libraries, and Vault-based components.
To ensure that parts are interchangeable, a smart check mechanism is implemented to check pin compatibility between base parts and alternate parts. This feature ensures that the pin type and position of both components are the same. The user interface is easy to use and includes the following additional features:
- Configure multiple components at once;
- Set variant parameters as well as project and schematic level parameters;
- Manage display data using filters for different component types;
- Generate variant reports for documents.