What's Good About ADW’s Board File Management? 16.6 Has a Few New Enhancements!

There are two new use models for PCB designers using Allegro Design Workbench (ADW) in 16.6. In 16.5, only a single PCB designer could work on the physical view of the design at one time.

Now, the 16.6 Team Design Authoring (TDA) - also known as the Team Design Option (TDO) in ADW - supports two use models:

1. Only a single designer can work on the physical view of the design at one time
2. Multiple physical designers can work concurrently
   • Multiple board files can be managed independently under the physical view
   • Board files can be assigned to different users (the Physical Design Integrator assigns users to board files)
   • Users check-in and check-out board files from the TDO dashboard

Read on for more details …


The Physical Design Integrator (PDI) assigns users for various board files in a design using the default policy file:

 

The Physical Design Engineers perform check out and check-in on the board files after doing a joint project from the TDA dashboard:

 

Sometimes physical board designers wish to manage the board along with associated data files as an atomic object.
An example could be to manage simulation files associated with a board (.brd) file along with it:

 


These collections are optional for physical designers and are required only if the designers wish to add files and a board to be managed as a single object. A collection can have its own derived data. A collection can have user-specified names with the default collection name being the name of the board file. Also, multiple users can be assigned to a collection. A user can rename, modify content, or delete a collection (delete means all files move out of a collection). A user can also check out and check in a collection.


Please share your feedback with these new capabilities!

Jerry “GenPart” Grzenia