Producing a whole set of schematic documents for a design has always been a rather tedious operation. When you have a very large number of pages to output, much time is spent simply opening these design objects and printing them. Most of this time is spent actually waiting and watching the computer. This is particularly frustrating when last minute changes are required just before sending data out for building the board, with this tedious process occurring at the worst time. Compound this when you have multiple variants and need to output each set of documentation and you can see there is an opportunity for a more productive method. Of course, there is the capability to Print All Design Sheets, but this does not handle the multiple variants situation. Various external script based processes are in use by customers, and these could probably be made to accomplish all of these requirements. But a solution integrated within the schematic capture tool itself is very simple and attractive for people to use.

This paper will describe the capabilties of an integrated single command solution for easily creating all required schematic documentation that handles multiple variants, hierarchy, hardcopy or output files. In addition it has the capability to set various instance properties to a desired visiblity state so that your documents have the correct text turned on.

Bio

Member of an Engineering Productivity team providing primary support for schematic capture. Over the last 14 years I have worked with and supported 2 locally developed CAD systems in addition to Mentor Graphics. I am considered an expert resource in the areas of schematic capture and the HP Design Library.