Proper component management using Mentor PADs?

[Pack34]

I would like to get a better handle on the components used across various designs. So far, everything that I'm now in charge of was done by various people by outsourcing the layout portion of the designs. This has caused a huge mismatch between the decals used across each individual design.

What I would like to do is to standardize everything and spend a week or two doing some librarian work to get everything up to "snuff"on designs that are still considered to be active.

I've moved to PADs from Eagle and they had a straight forward library control where I can easily browse through all of the available components, see the footprints and the schematic symbols.

Does this not exist in PADs? All of the individual programs seem to be completely separate and I cannot seem to find an individual component library program.

[uncle_bob]

Hi

A word of caution:

Each layout was done with "it's own" symbols. You will quickly find that if you have 10 authors, you have 10 unique symbols for (say) 0603 resistors. It is tempting to create a single global 0603 resistor and only deal with one from here on out. If you do that, be prepared to go back to every blasted layout and check what the implications are. There *may* be no impact at all. There *could* be all sorts of DRC / push and shove related to a new pad size or solder mask opening.

The alternative is to simply keep the outsourced layouts as stand alone projects and leave it at that. If you ever have to touch them, you do it on a stand alone basis. Yes that's a bit of a pain. It is the downside to having everything outsourced with no control on what gets done. This may sound a bit negative, but it does work pretty well. Cut and paste at the layout level is pretty rare. Once a board is validated and approved, at least where I work, there isn't a lot of touching that goes on. We may go back and do another version of that board in a year or two. In that case, deal with the conversion when you start the new board.

If you were on Expedition rather than Pads I could help with the library issue. Indeed it's in there. I just can't tell you which drop down menu it's buried under.

Bob

[vzoole]

I dont know PADS well but what version of PADS anyway?

The main difference between PADS Standard and Standard Plus is how it handle the library.
The PADS Professional is totally different. It is an Expedition with some disabled high-end functions.

[PCB.Wiz]

I've moved to PADs from Eagle and they had a straight forward library control where I can easily browse through all of the available components, see the footprints and the schematic symbols.

Does this not exist in PADs? All of the individual programs seem to be completely separate and I cannot seem to find an individual component library program.

PADS has quite poor Library overview & publishing, but you can see un-dimensioned thumbnails under
File.Library  & you can list names to a file.
You can search by wildcard, provided you already know a good portion of the name.
You cannot search by pin-count.
What is harder to do, is print a sheet with each footprint on it.

All the above works on Libraries, if you have external multi-source PCBs, those remote libraries are dispersed local to those design files.

You can save to library from a design, so if the desired  library is not too large, you can place all parts on a design, print that, and save those to a named unique library.

[Pack34]

I dont know PADS well but what version of PADS anyway?

The main difference between PADS Standard and Standard Plus is how it handle the library.
The PADS Professional is totally different. It is an Expedition with some disabled high-end functions.

We're running PADs 9.2 Standard