Reverse Engineering Project Libraries - Pierre-Marie Meyitang AE.indd

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REVERSE ENGINEERING PROJECT LIBRARIES

Outsourcing has become the de-facto solution for companies seeking to cut costs and increase their proﬁ t margins. Rather

than consuming their own resources on a particular task, companies farm it out to other ﬁ rms that specializes in that

particular area, leaving them to focus on what they do best. New product design often gets contracted out to separate design

ﬁ rms. If that’s you — your company outsources PCB design or your company is a PCB design house — read on because this

paper can make your life easier.

COMMUNICATION

Outsourcing work to other companies demands better communication among all parties involved

. For PCB design

engineers, this means ensuring that complete PCB project ﬁ les are sent to clients. Unfortunately, receiving ﬁ les from clients

isn’t always as smooth a process. Clients may send incomplete project ﬁ les, project ﬁ les with unstandardized component

libraries, or other ﬁ les that don’t match what you actually need. When that happens, how do you proceed with the project?

Here is an overview of the challenges that can arise when board designers need to generate source libraries solely from

design project ﬁ les, as well as some available solutions that can help facilitate this process.

PCB PROJECT FILES

Project ﬁ le structure varies widely among diﬀ erent brands of PCB design software. Typically software packages have the six

ﬁ le types illustrated in the following table.

Table 1: Typical ﬁ le structure for PCB design software packages

FILE CONTENTS

Schematic File Project electrical schematic with logical connections. Generally readable outside

software tool.

PCB File Trace and routing information and the physical board attributes. Generally readable

outside software tool.

Database File Metadata regarding the components

PCB Library File Physical component parameters

Schematic Library File Electrical component parameters and component symbols

Main File Links and references to to other ﬁ les, project options, conﬁ guration parameters

Most Schematic and PCB ﬁ les are self-contained. This means that a contractor could send just the schematics or PCB ﬁ le

alone to a client, and the client would be able to open and view the full Schematic and PCB ﬁ le content. This ﬂ exibility may

seem convenient, but it can be a double edged sword. It often leads to situations wherein a customer only recovers PCB or

Schematic ﬁ les due to premature termination of an agreement with their previous contractor(s). The client’s next contractor

then gets burdened with having to base future designs oﬀ of the incomplete project ﬁ les that the client has supplied. Autom

In many cases, editing components within the design is not immediately possible with Schematic and PCB ﬁ les alone. In those

cases, Schematic and PCB library ﬁ les are required as well. This becomes all too evident when a designer needs to mass-edit

components in a PCB design project. With library ﬁ les, contractors have more ﬂ exibility, including the ability to:

 Modify a given component footprint and update thousands of references

 Create standardized components

 Modify component footprints and symbols

Achieving these tasks for a few components is easy. But how about having to recreate a footprint and symbol for thousands

of diﬀ erent components, each time a new design arrives from a client? The contractor would need to reinvent the wheel,

regenerating new libraries for the existing design. It’s both impractical and incredibly time consuming. The solution is

automated reverse engineering.

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REVERSE ENGINEERING PROJECT LIBRARIES

REVERSE ENGINEERING PROJECT LIBRARIES USING ALTIUM DESIGNER

Altium Designer

incorporates three separate tools that can make regenerating schematic and PCB libraries from the raw

schematic and PCB (SCHDOC and PCBDOC) ﬁ les much easier. There’s a “Make Schematic library” tool for schematic ﬁ les

and a “Make PCB library” tool for PCB ﬁ les. Finally, there’s the “Make

Integrated Library” tool, to incorporate documents from both ﬁ le

types. Each tool automatically generates source libraries from

supplied Schematic and PCB documents with a single mouse click.

As shown in Figure 1, access the “Make Schematic Library” tool

from the menu option Design » Make Schematic Library while

a schematic document is active. This tool generates a library ﬁ le

containing a symbol and/or SPICE model for each unique component

in the design. For components using the same symbol reference,

only one library symbol entry is created

You can see in Figure 2 that the Make PCB Library tool can be

accessed from the menu option Design » Make PCB Library, while a

PCB document is active. This tool generates a library ﬁ le containing a

footprint and/or 3D model for each unique component in the design.

For components using the same footprint reference, only one library

footprint entry will be created

In Altium Designer, integrated libraries contain, at minimum, both

PCB footprints and their associated Schematic symbols. They can

also include SPICE and 3D models of components. The “Make

Integrated Library” tool can be accessed from the menu option

Design » Make Integrated Library, while either a Schematic or

PCB document is active. This tool generates a library ﬁ le containing

both footprint and symbol information for each unique component

in the design. It is essentially a container for PCB and SCH libraries

Because integrated libraries are read-only by default, they’re perfect

for situations where contractors need to send source ﬁ les to clients

for ﬁ nal review, but do not want clients accidentally modifying those

ﬁ les. Of course, integrated libraries can be easily edited if the need

arises.

CONCLUSION

Reverse engineering anything is not an easy task. Depending

on how complete the source ﬁ les received from customers are,

reverse engineering could take anywhere from a few minutes for

small projects, to several days for larger projects. When contracting

PCB design work, wasted time means wasted money, both for the

contractors and for the clients. This extra time spent recreating

libraries can end up sending both parties over budget. So why spend all of that time and money re-inventing the wheel, when

an automated, aﬀ ordable, and time-saving solution exists with Altium Designer?

Figure 1: Access to the “Make Schematic Library Tool”.

Figure 2: Access to the “Make PCB Library Tool”.

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REVERSE ENGINEERING PROJECT LIBRARIES

USEFUL LINKS

Altium Tech Docs:

https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Library+and+Component+Management

https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Building+an+Integrated+Library

Altium Designer Free Trial:

http://www.altium.com/free-trial

References:

I. Leung, “How to contract electronic design work,” 12 04 2012. [Online]. Available: https://electronicsnews.com.au/how-to-

contract-electronic-design-work/.

Altium Inc, “Creating Library Components Tutorial,” 18 02 2014. [Online]. Available: https://techdocs.altium.com/display/

ADOH/Creating+Library+Components+Tutorial. [Accessed 30 05 2016].