Design Variance in OrCAD Capture

Many times, a PCB board just needs minor variations to make it work for a different application. A common example is designing a power supply to be used at different voltages or changing pullup and pulldown resistors depending on the PCB usage. In such cases, reworking the entire PCB is certainly not the best idea.

Assembly variants come to our rescue here. You just need to design your core PCB and then create design variants, one each for a unique application.

In these variants, you can choose to remove some component or replace it with a new part with a different value or change other attributes. Variants bring a range of new possibilities to component management and scalable designs.

In Capture CIS, creating a variant is as easy as it gets. Part Manager allows creating and managing variants by simple drag-drop operations. You can create as many variants as you need in one design.

The schematic view of a variant shows the modified components for easy review. You can also create Variant BOM reports for each variant.

Here is a quick video demonstrating the capability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxRIyKwbNKY

Team DesignTech

Cadence Design Systems