PRODUCT HOW-TO: Hardware IP design reuse made easy with Altium's Innovation Station

By Phil Loughhead, Altium Ltd.
Embedded.com (01/30/09, 09:43:00 PM EST)

The ability to reuse existing sections of designs is like the quest for the holy grail in our design team - something we value highly and dream of finding, but have yet to discover. And if you were to push me to take a position, I used to doubt it would ever be found.

So I'd have to say that I was skeptical when I read statements about design reuse in Altium Designer - "I'll believe that when I see it" were my exact words.

Everyone in the team was already practicing design re-use, we were copying and pasting sections of existing designs " like standard comms or power supply sub-circuits " into our current projects.

But there was no integrity in the copied design, because any number of mistakes could be made during the copy/paste process, and the engineer could and would modify the circuit to suit their idea of a good circuit. That meant it had to be subject to the standard review and triple-check sign-off process.

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