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Subject: Regarding Manual Placement and footprint assignment
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ma479
Posts: 2
Online: User is Offline
5/29/2008 10:46 PM  
Hello everyone, I have few questions regarding a small but high speed board I am designing in these days. I did not follow all the steps like schematic design but started directly with footprint design and manual placement and routing.

1. I have made foot prints of different components and saved them in *.psm and *.dra form.
2. Now I started board design and wanted to manually place all these components. But when I clicked on place->Manual, it shows a dialog box which shows package symbols either from library or from database. I tried saving all *.psm and *.dra in the same directory where I saved *.brd file but I could not locate these footprints in Manual placement dialog box. Please tell me how to solve this problem.

Even when I tried placing some random package from library, I could not figure out how to change refdes which is like the default name of that foot print.

After trying hard to do all this, I decided to go through proper way and made a schematic of whole thing. I placed all these footprints in the same directory where I placed this schematic project. Now when after creating netlist, I exported netlist in PCB editor, again it failed to locate footprints. While editing part in schematic, I tried giving full path of each component but it did not work. Please help me in this regard

Also please can anyone suggest me some step, by step tutorial that could lead me through each step in Allegro PCB editor.

thanks
cadpro2k
Posts: 45
Online: User is Offline
5/30/2008 8:23 AM  
First things first, we need to know your HOME location. Look at your My Computer/Environment Variables and look for HOME.
Do you have an 'env' file there? If so good. If not, no problem. If you don't have one there, then look into your Cadence install folder, under$INSTALL$\share\pcb\text. Edit the 'env' file, add this:

set PADPATH = . symbols .. ../symbols
set PSMPATH = . symbols .. ../symbols

This will point to a couple areas to look for your footprints. "." being current folder you're running Allegro from, ".." being one folder up, etc.

I will normally have a symbols folder locally for my projects in case I need to make something on the fly. Most cases, all my footprints come out of my released folder that I've pointed to in my HOME\env file.

#2 - refdes on manually placed devices, without a netlist. You can't change the refdes until you get the netlist info. You can place footprints randomly, then read in a netlist. Once you've read in the netlist, all you need to do is "Logic/Assign RefDes", and reassign the $REFDES to what your netlist is.

Let me know if that gets you going. Good day.
Mitch
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Forums > Silicon-package-board > PCB Design > Regarding Manual Placement and footprint assignment


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