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PCB DESIGN BEST PRACTICE

Design reuse

Reusing proven elements from previous PCB designs through a library of certified circuits allows new product development teams to leverage past successes for the benefit of their latest generation of products.

What is PCB design reuse?

PCB design reuse is the reuse of approved, validated, and or known good circuitry or Intellectual Property (IP) across multiple designs and throughout an organization. By implementing reuse, it eliminates unnecessary and or repeated efforts, saves time and reduces or minimizes project risks.

The benefits of PCB design reuse

Reuse proven logical and physical elements

Design teams can quickly build new products by publishing reusable logical and physical IP directly and then sharing this IP with others.

Reduce cost and improve PCB design quality

Ensure continuous circuit improvement by certifying critical IP blocks.

Increase collaboration and efficiency

Foster concurrent development of today’s complex PCB designs.

Key features of design reuse with Xpedition

Xpedition EDM facilitates design reuse through enterprise-wide data management of reusable circuit blocks (managed blocks) from both the library and design perspectives. Reusable circuit blocks provide teams with an efficient process to leverage a library of 'certified' circuitry during new PCB development.

There are two types of managed blocks:

Self-managed blocks

The self-managed flow supports basic data management and sharing without EDM design reuse tools integration. The self-managed block design methodology provides engineers and designers with control of block circuitry creation, development and deployment to library clients for use in new designs without the rigidity of a formal process. Self-managed blocks do not use a formal centralized library management system.

Enterprise-managed blocks

The enterprise flow supports formal design data management and sharing using the Xpedition EDM tool suite to control and propagate reusable circuit blocks to production library caches.

The enterprise-managed block design methodology uses the Xpedition EDM tool suite for data management of the block, source design, and library objects. Schematic capture and layout tools launched from the EDM suite manage block design creation, development, deployment, and change orders in a tightly integrated system.

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Image of design reuse capability in Xpedition software

By implementing design reuse, it eliminates unnecessary and or repeated efforts, saves time and reduces or minimizes project risks. Learn more by reading our design reuse blog or listening to our design reuse podcast.

Resources

Frequently asked questions about PCB design reuse

Having a centralized library helps to maximize the benefits of design reuse. A data management system allows users to search, filter by and quickly identify managed blocks based on parametric data. Users can then reuse these blocks, create a variant, and push it back into the library with notes. It ultimately streamlines the whole PCB design process for future projects.

First, the entire engineering organization should work off one central library. From there, it’s necessary to understand your how you want to build and structure your managed blocks (reusable designs) within that centralized library. For example, you may have analog designs, RF designs, and power designs that all need to be sorted and organized for future reuse.

It’s also important to have your requirements and your analysis for each of the managed blocks defined and stored with that managed block for the lifecycle of the design, so that way other engineers can just quickly look at the design and understand if it meets their needs.

The goal of PCB design reuse is to enable the reuse of proven elements from previous PCB designs to speed up the design process and reduce engineering costs.

"Reusable IP" means Intellectual Property (IP) that can be reused in multiple applications or projects. In the case of PCB design reuse, this IP is a previously designed circuit or block of circuits that has been tested and verified in products previously released to the market.

The Xpedition EDM design cockpit manages the source design projects and managed block design data. Users invoke design authoring tools, such as Xpedition Designer and Xpedition Layout, to create, update and publish logical and logical/physical managed block objects.

When published, managed blocks save to the EDM design cockpit and the EDM library cockpit. The EDM tools control the relationships between design data and library data.

Users can also place published logical and logical/physical reusable circuits that are managed by the Xpedition EDM tool suite in host designs that are external to EDM. For example, users who can access re-use blocks from a production library cache can use those blocks in designs without EDM integration.