MISC-TN-023: Altium Designer-based workflow
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History[edit | edit source]
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.0 | June 2022 | First public release |
Introduction[edit | edit source]
Unlike most of the Technical Notes (TN for short) available in this wiki, this one does not refer to any DAVE Embedded Systems' product. Instead, this article deals with one of the tools we use for hardware designing, namely Altium Designer. More specifically, this TN describes how DAVE Embedded Systems conceived an Altium Designer-based design workflow, which is fully integrated with the existing company's IT infrastructure and procedures.
Requirements[edit | edit source]
In order to implement a smooth integration towards all the company's departments, the workflow had to satisfy multiple requirements. The most important are:
- Technical documents for manufacturing: At the end of the design process, a set of standardized technical documents has to be generated automatically for the manufacturing department. This set must be equivalent to the ones produced by other hardware design workflows already in use, which are based on different tools.
- Database interfacing: The hardware projects must be interfaced to the existing component's database, which is shared across all the company departments (purchasing, manufacturing, R&D, etc.). From this database, several data are retrieved during the design process. These data are stored in the project for each instantiated component. Examples are the manufacturer code, the operating temperature range, the nominal value of passive components, etc. This information is vital for bill of materials (BOM) management and post-design automatic checks.
- Projects sharing: Nowadays, it is often necessary to share the hardware projects with other departments or partners outside the company even during the development of the projects themselves. In this regard, the native Altium 365® platform does this job superbly therefore it was included in the workflow.
Implementation[edit | edit source]
The overall workflow is depicted in the following image.
TBD
