Setting the error reporting mode in Altium’s project optionsĪltium will run all of the checks that you see in the error reporting tab when you compile the schematic. When you click on the colored icon, a drop-down menu will appear where you can select one of four different options as shown below. The different options available to you are as follows: You can set up how Altium will report these different conditions to you by clicking on the colored icons in the “Report Mode” column on the right. Since we are focusing here on managing net connection orders, we’ve scrolled down to the “Violations Associated with Nets” section.

The first tab is the error reporting tab and it allows you to set up how different aspects of your design are going to be reported. As you can see below, the project options menu has many tabs across it.

You can either go to the Project pull-down menu and select “Project Options,” or right-click in a schematic sheet and select it there. These tools are found in the project options. Setting up the Error ReportingĪltium gives you a couple of different tools to work with so that you can control the checking of your schematic before you even go into layout with the design. Here are some of the features that we are now using in Altium that have helped us. This has been very helpful in the communication between engineering and layout and has been a big factor in reducing the errors that used to plague us before. Altium Designer ® gives us several tools that we can use to verify our schematic and even alter the net rules for layout. The design tools we use now are much better at managing the net connection order between the schematic and the layout. We would communicate our design intent through documents and spreadsheets followed by meetings and even time spent working with them, and yet somehow it still would get messed up. The layout guys were an even bigger mystery, working all hours of the night and day on these complex Unix machines that supported their CAD layout tools. We would create the schematics in our department, and then the system administrators would work their voodoo and transfer all that data from us into the layout department. When I first started designing printed circuit boards, it was a very unorganized process.

Altium designer pcb without schematic