In Altium Designer, you will be creating a footprint. Depending on the type of CAD system you’ve used before, you may have seen these referred to as “decals”, “land patterns,” or “geometries”. The first part of the component we will build is the footprint for the physical PCB layout. To get started with this, I am first going to create an empty PCB project in Altium Designer, and I will save it with the name “Component Example”. The point, after all, is to make it so that you are comfortable enough with your PCB design software that, any library system and any component structure can become an easy and intuitive organizational process that you can refer back to whenever necessary. Although it may seem like we would want to start with the symbol, we are actually going to create a footprint first so we can have it ready to use once we complete the symbol. Once the symbol has been associated with a footprint, the symbol, along with the footprint, is now considered a component. Altium Designer is a great example of that type of system.Īltium Designer offers a schematic symbol part as well as a layout footprint part. Fortunately, better systems came along that allowed for library containment these systems were more intuitive and much easier to work with. Without a synchronized system that easily cataloged and stored library parts, we would simply create new parts each time. On older CAD systems, there was a time when it was easier to create a fresh library for each job. There are a few things that are helpful to know about this process, however, and we will walk through the library component creation process in Altium Designer so you can see what’s involved. PCB design tools, like Altium Designer 18, are set up to help you to quickly create a quality library component to use in your design. Processes are automated, and more importantly, the component is usually a combination of both the logical schematic symbol and the physical layout footprint. Today’s CAD systems are far different and much easier to use. The other problem was that schematic capture and PCB layout were usually completed using separate tools, which meant that schematic components and layout footprints were not associated with each other. Those first tools didn’t offer much assistance to designers and you had to be really good at manipulating primitive graphics like lines, arcs, and circles to create what you wanted. Later on, as designers migrated to CAD tools, the components were built using those same CAD tools. Originally, PCB designers created library components by laying down a sticker or “dolly” on a sheet of mylar on a drafting board. Circuit board design has changed a lot over the years, and the way we work with library components has shifted as well.

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