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Advice needed: How manage Design alternatives

eddoh

Hello everyone,

beginner here so I'm trying to undersand how best to best get organized to work with Capture.

I wonder what is the "best practice" to manage design alternatives (that is, different circuits functionally equivalent but potentially very different in terms of schematic.)


I'm currently using hierarchical blocks which I am plugging in and out of a "core" board for testing (currently replacing manually the block, till I find a smarter way to do this. Changing the implementation property of the hierarchical block  leads to some crashes of the app, still need to dig into that)

In the below "top level" schematic, every hierarchical block represent a physical different PCB. One of these blocks points to two hierachical block alternatives, here Board_interm_JFET and Board interm MOSFET.

I'm not completely happy as I'd like this to be better organized (I tried placing the alternatives as pages in the same Schematic, but that does not work when I try to convert into a PCB as all the components end up staged for the layout)

Is there a proper way to organize this? Please provide me some hints, I have looked at BOM Variants but if I undertstood properly is not the proper way.

Thanks!

  • So if the end game is a viable PCB then getting to that in the easiest way is to have a flat schematic and netlist, aka no " hierarchical blocks"

    The way we do things is have a P/N for the board & the Schematic. The Schematic only contains footprints that exist on the board. If you need to chop and change the schematic then it is going to
    be difficult from the board perspective, even more difficult to get a viable product too.

    Normally the way we do Schematics is Page 1 would be what we call a cover page. The cover page may have some notes and a block diagram. The additional pages only pertain to the the product.
    There are no design variants. Basically 1 schematic = 1 board.

    If a change is needed to the board then we do an ECO and rev the board forward to reflect the changes. The P/N would be changed to Rev b, c etc. If you keep things 1:1 stuff like a BOM etc will be alot
    easier.

    All the Best.

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