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Editable "subcircuits" or similar in Eagle??

dougmc

Greetings Eagle experts.

I've done a couple of boards in Eagle, but consider myself a novice. I do have quite a lot of experience in EDA (full custom asic) and there are some things that I feel *should* be possible in the world of PCB design, but seem difficult/impossible with Eagle. Perhaps eagle isn't the best tool for the job?

 

I have a multichannel driver design that has a repeated output stage (repeated 32 times). Obviously I'd like to design it once and step-and-repeat it. That alone seems clumsy, at best.

 

What I would really like is to have that block as some kind of "subcircuit" so that if I tweak a component value, say, or alter the layout in one block, it automatically propagates through the other copies. The intent would be to wire the subcircuits together at some other level in a hierarchy.

 

This seems obvious and very desirable (to me). Is such a thing possible? Is it possible in other PCB tools? I do this type of hierarchical design/layout in IC design all the time so it seems likely it's common in PCB design too...

 

Am I just being dense?

Doug

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  • Hi Doug,

     

    Welcome to Element14!

     

    What you are wanting to do sounds completely sensible to me, it's how I would try and do things like that. In EAGLE you can do what you want to an extent but not completely. For example, you can use modules in the schematic so you can define a module once and instantiate a number of copies of each module in the schematic and they'll appear in your board. They'll have unique reference designators but not in the way you may like. Basically you get the refs as defined in the module with a prefix for each module instance. But in the layout each module instance needs to be individually placed and routed still.

     

    In V8 they now have a new design blocks feature which may help with this but I am not 100% sure as I haven't used it yet. I think it'll get there, they're going in the right direction at least, they need more work on their hierarchical design implementation still though I think, especially in the board.

     

    Best Regards,

     

    Rachael

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  • Hi Doug,

     

    Welcome to Element14!

     

    What you are wanting to do sounds completely sensible to me, it's how I would try and do things like that. In EAGLE you can do what you want to an extent but not completely. For example, you can use modules in the schematic so you can define a module once and instantiate a number of copies of each module in the schematic and they'll appear in your board. They'll have unique reference designators but not in the way you may like. Basically you get the refs as defined in the module with a prefix for each module instance. But in the layout each module instance needs to be individually placed and routed still.

     

    In V8 they now have a new design blocks feature which may help with this but I am not 100% sure as I haven't used it yet. I think it'll get there, they're going in the right direction at least, they need more work on their hierarchical design implementation still though I think, especially in the board.

     

    Best Regards,

     

    Rachael

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  • in reply to rachaelp

    Hi Rachel,

     

    Thanks for the reply. I'm glad to see I'm not I'm not entirely losing my mind, but I'm very disappointed that this can't be done. For me, it just seems insane to replicate layout work again and again, and then to have to try to make sure changes are made properly to each instance.

    In particular, I'm thinking of the layout. The schematic is easier to slap together, but layout changes are tedious.

     

    Maybe PCB design doesn't call for this sort of thing terribly often, but it is something I would really like... 

     

    Do you know if any other PCB design tools have this capability? I'd rather spend the money now to get something more capable and avoid the re-learning process.

    Cheers!

    Doug