NI Circuit Design Community Blog
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- GarretF on: LabVIEW-Multisim Co-Simulation with Variants and Hierarchical Blocks (Part 2)
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Control_Dir
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Adding 3D Information in Ultiboard
Creating Multi-channel Designs
Multi-channel designs occur when the same circuitry is repeated two or more times. Usually, you will want to layout these channels identically on the PCB so that the behaviour of these channels is as close as possible. In Ultiboard, replicating the layout of multiple parts is achieved by creating a part group for each channel, then using the Group Replica Place command. This commands copies the placement and routing details from one part group to another.
The new annotation system in version 11.0 makes this process even easier. The easiest way to ensure that each channel in a multi-channel design is identical is to use a hierarchical design where each there are multiple instances of the same subsheet as shown below.
Here, the SC1 to SC4 represent 4 independent channels in the multi-channel design. Notice that the name of each subsheet is Channel, which indicates that there are 4 instances of the same subsheet, ensuring that changes to one channel are automatically replicated in the others.
So far, nothing new. Then how does the new annotation system in version 11.0 make this process easier? Transferring your design to Ultiboard flattens the design because there is no concept of hierarchy in PCB design. Because multiple instances of the same subsheet were identical, you had to manually determine the appropriate channel in Ultiboard for each part, even though that grouping was described in Multisim through the use of hierarchy. Essentially, this meant re-entering this information when creating the part groups. With the new annotation system, components in multiply instanced subsheets can have different part groups, and this part group information can be transferred to Ultiboard to automatically create part groups in Ultiboard.
The way to do this is to set the part group for the components in each subsheet to be different in the spreadsheet.
In our 4 channel example, each channel contains one resistor and one capacitor, and they are grouped by creating assigning them the part groups ChannelA through ChannelD. A small change, but a world of difference when creating multi-channel designs.
