Copying layout and placement

Motivation

Often times, your design includes similar-but-not-identical sections such as voltage regulators. Wouldn’t it be nice if you’d only had to do layout and placement once and then copy it to the other instances? Horzion EDA lets you do just that in a simple two-step process.

Groups & Tags

For this feature to work, you’ll first need to tell horizon EDA how the components fit together. This is accomplished by assigning groups and tags to components. Each section, i.e. all components associated with one voltage regulator, get assigned one group. To do so, select all symbols of one section and use the tool “Set new group” to assign all of them to a new group. For making groups and tags visible on the schematic, use the “Toggle group & tag visibility”. A components group and tag will then show up below the reference designator.

To tell horizon EDA the matching components in each group, these get assigned identical tags. Since a newly-placed component will already be assigned a unique tag and groups and tags get preserved on copy/paste other instances of the same circuit will likely have the appropriate tags already set. To change the tag on a component, use the “Set tag” tool.

When you’re done, the schematic should roughly look like this (with the boxes added for clarification). All components inside a yellow box belong to the same group, all inside a red box belong to the same tag.

_images/groups-tags.png

You may use the “Highlight group/tag” action to make sure that you got the assignments right.

Board

Place and route any group as usual.

Copy placement

For each group, place the package you’d like the other packages to be referenced to at the desired position and place all other packages anywhere. Then, select all packages of the group that you’d like to apply the placement to and start the “Copy placement” tool. Click on the reference package (any pad or centroid) in the already placed group and all selected packages will be placed accordingly.

Copy tracks

Select all tracks (other objects will be ignored) you want to copy in the routed group, start the “Copy tracks” tool and click on any package (any pad or centroid) in the destination group.