IN THE WORKSHOP Tip #14

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IN THE WORKSHOP – Tip #14

Smart Grid tools – accelerate your component

creation

Summary

May 2007 Author: Phil Loughhead Component creation is a fundamental part of the design process, and must be done accurately. Altium Designer’s Smart Grid tools can streamline this process, allowing you to copy data from a datasheet or spreadsheet, and then intelligently map the copied data to Altium Designer object properties. Components and component libraries are the base materials from which you build your designs. While Altium Designer includes over 80,000 physical components, there will always be times when you will need to create your own, and it is essential that they are complete and correct. This process of transferring information from a data book into Altium Designer has been greatly enhanced and simplified with the introduction of the Smart Grid tools. With these you can copy data from a datasheet or spreadsheet, and then intelligently map the copied data to Altium Designer object properties – ideal for highvolume tabular data such as component pins.

The challenge of creating large components

The schematic symbol is the logical representation of the component. As important and valuable as they are, they can be tedious and time consuming to create. It’s a distraction from the main game of capturing your innovative idea and implementing it. To make matters worse, increasing component integration means higher pin counts, making for components that take even longer to create and check. It’s the pins that take most of your valuable component creation time. Wouldn’t it be great if you could copy all the pin data from a manufacturer’s datasheet, and paste it straight into your new schematic component. Altium Designer’s List panel has long supported pasting data directly from a spreadsheet, but the technique requires that you precisely pre format the data and select the exact target cells in the panel.

Enter the new Smart Grid tools. Supporting both creation (Smart Grid Insert) and modification (Smart Grid Paste), these tools let you map current clipboard data to Altium Designer object properties. These tools greatly simplify the component creation process and in a few steps you can create the pins of a component directly from external data. And you can use them for more than schematic component creation – you have access to these powerful Smart Grid tools in the schematic and schematic library editors, and also in the PCB and PCB library editors.

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Setting up the pin data

You can often get tabular pin data directly from the component manufacturer, either in spreadsheets or as an ASCII file. If you have a full license of Adobe Acrobat, you can also use the Select Table tool to extract tabular information directly from a PDF.

You can select tabular pin information directly from the PDF if you have a full license of Adobe Acrobat.

While you could copy straight from the source pin data into Altium Designer, it is worth doing a small amount of preparatory work to achieve an optimal result. A spreadsheet is the right place to do that. Typically you will only need to perform a few steps, including:

§ Adding a header row to make the columntocolumn mapping easier. Don’t worry about getting the column names exactly the same, Altium Designer does a good job of automatically inferring the correct mapping.

§ Adding an Object Kind column, so that Altium Designer knows that it is has to create pintype objects.

§ Adding a Type column, to specify each pin’s electrical type.

§ Including X and Y pin locations. Spreadsheets have excellent tools for filling cells with values, for example if you rightclick and drag to select a set of cells in Microsoft Excel, you can specify the numeric series you want, making it easy to space the pins out in the schematic library.

Highpin count and regularly sectioned components, such as FPGAs, lend themselves to implementation as multipart components in Altium Designer. The easiest way to do that is to create all the pins in the first part of the Altium Designer component, and then cut and paste the blocks of pins to the other parts.

To get the pins into neat, partready groups, try leaving a couple of empty rows between the pins for each part in the spreadsheet. Not only does it make it easy to see where you might need to restart coordinate values, you can also automatically add X, Y values to a large selection and then remove the redundant X, Y values in the empty rows. This will result in no pins in those deleted locations, neatly spacing the partready groups.

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Use the tools in the spreadsheet to add suitable X and Y coordinates for the pins.

Smart Grid Insert to create new pins

The Smart Grid tools are available in all the Altium Designer List panels. To use Smart Grid Insert to create pins based on spreadsheet data, first create a new component in a library, then open the SchLib List panel (Shift+F12), and you’re ready to go.

Select and copy the required cells in your spreadsheet. Don’t worry if there are columns in the selection that you don’t need, the Smart Grid tools can ignore these.

Switch back to Altium Designer, rightclick in the SchLib List panel and select Smart Grid Insert from the menu. The Smart Grid Insert dialog will open.

The Smart Grid dialog has two regions. The upper region shows the data that is currently on the Windows clipboard, we’ll call that the source data. The lower region is the objects that are going to be created, which we’ll call the created objects. If your source data includes a header row Altium Designer will attempt to automatically identify the object kind, then build a list of created objects. A point to keep in mind, before you map columns the list of created objects will have the properties of the current Altium Designer default pin object. So for example, if you wanted all the pins placed at 180 degrees with a length of 20, then set the default values in Altium Designer before starting the smart grid process. That way you don’t need to worry about adding those settings into the spreadsheet, or editing them in Altium Designer after the creation process. Not sure how to set the defaults? Just select Place » Pin from the menus, then before you place a pin press Tab to edit the default values, then place and delete that one pin.

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Another big advantage of including a header row is that you get to use the Automatically Determine Paste button. This is a great feature – it will search and compare fields in the created object against source data column titles, and make intelligent choices about how they should be mapped. Don’t worry if the automatic feature gets one wrong, you can use the Undo Paste button to undo a mapped column. To manually map, select a column in the source data and its corresponding column in the created objects, then click the Paste Column button.

The Smart Grid Inserted pins, and the parts with the component bodies added.

As soon as you click OK, the set of created objects will appear in the component editing workspace. Add a suitable body to each part, then cut and paste to create the individual parts, and your symbol is ready.

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Smart Grid Paste to edit existing pins

Complementing the Smart Grid Insert command is the Smart Grid Paste feature. Use this command when you need to modify existing objects, rather than create new objects. You could, for example, use it when you have copied and pasted an existing component and need to modify its pins.

Where Smart Grid Insert creates as many objects as there are rows in the clipboard data, Smart Grid Paste will automatically select and target the same number of existing objects in the List as there are rows in the clipboard data. The selection point is the current cell in the List panel, keep that in mind when you rightclick to choose the Smart Grid Paste command.