How to convert PCB into Schematic in Altium?

[egzoz2003@yahoo.com]

Hi,

Is it possible to reverse engineering a PCB board to Schematic with Altium designer ?

[thm_w]

Not easily

https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/cam-editor-reverse-engineering-pcbs

[Doctorandus_P]

That link to the altium website is about reverse generating a PCB from CAM output. Not about creating a schematic.

KiCad has a feature in which netlist data can be back ported to the schematic, and it can create wire labels attached to schematic symbols. I have not used this feature myself, and don't know how good it works.

KiCad can import an altium PCB (or directly import Gerbers). And apparently altium can (or could?) import a KiCad project. I think that may be limited to the KiCad V6 file formart. I don't know if altium put any effort into keeping that feature of their softwar up to date. KiCad has just released V9.

A method that always work, is to manually enter a schematic, and link them to the already existing PCB footprints. You can then "guess" the schematic, and differences will be flagged by DRC once the schematic is ported back to the PCB. Often quite big parts of a schematic can be easily guessed. This is an iterative process and thus takes some time

[egzoz2003@yahoo.com]

Is is possible to do it with Altium ? Draw PCB and generate Schematic ?

[cadguy68]

Do you mean like push a button and a schematic appears?

No.

[tooki]

KiCad can import an altium PCB (or directly import Gerbers). And apparently altium can (or could?) import a KiCad project. I think that may be limited to the KiCad V6 file formart. I don't know if altium put any effort into keeping that feature of their softwar up to date. KiCad has just released V9.

Altium has been able to import KiCad 7 files for around 2 years, and KiCad 8 files for around a year. Presumably they'll update the importer to V9 soon enough.

FYI, KiCad import is a separate extension in Altium that must be installed. It doesn't show up under "Get More Importers" button in the Import Wizard.

[djsb]

Judging from the amount of complaints on the Altium forum, the KiCad importer does not work on anything but older versions of KiCad.
You also need to have an active subscription and a licence to Altium (of which there are many types of licence). Then you are able to download the extension required.
KiCad can however import Altium projects (from V9.00), schematics and PCB design files.

[Doctorandus_P]

One way (and the most logical) that works with any PCB design suite because it is very close to the normal workflow is to:

• Draw a partial schematic (Known IC's, resistors, etc)
• Glean or measure some connections on the PCB.
• Make those connections in the schematic
• Port the schematic to the PCB editor (footprints, netlist, etc)
• Run DRC. Differences between the connections taken from the schematic, and the actual connections on the PCB will be flagged
• Go back to the schematic, and extend / modify it.
• Keep on repeating the whole process until there are no more errors when you run DRC.

[Simmed]

Is is possible to do it with Altium ? Draw PCB and generate Schematic ?

so you are saying
you pick the component physical
then you draw the trace on board layout connecting items
and then you want the schematic to show the symbol and connection ?