EAGLE Pro Webinar – Multi-Part Component Creation

Ever play that game as a kid when all of your friends told you to count to 100 before looking for their hiding spot? 1, 2, skip a few, 99, 100! As fun as it was back then, that’s also kind of how pin counts seem to progress in our electronic components. We all start off with the simple building blocks. Things like capacitors or resistors or LEDs that mostly have two pins. But this is just the beginning.  

But before you know it, you soon find yourself dealing with integrated circuits, FPGAs, and maybe even microchips. And that’s when you might be staring down at 100, 200, 600 pins and more! Managing this growing complexity of components is no easy task, especially when you have to create the parts yourself. But worry not, we’ve got just the webinar for you in our EAGLE Pro series. Introducing Multi-Part Component Creation.

From a Walk to a Run

Components are more than just a resistor or a capacitor. Outside of the family of basic passive electronic components, you have a whole slew of active parts that slowly ramp up the pin counts, and you might be having trouble keeping up.

After all, what exactly do you do when you have to make a 128 pin connector in your PCB design tool? Or a 600 pin FPGA? And more importantly, how are you supposed to fit all of the growing complexity of your libraries onto a single schematic sheet?

Back in the early days of passive components, it was a simple matter of dropping down two pins for a resistor, giving it an outline, and calling it a day. Same thing for the package, add a couple of pads, a silkscreen outline, and bam, you’re done. All of this could be handled on one single schematic sheet, making it a piece of cake.

But then, my friends, you encounter your first massive component, it has 100 pins, multiple parts, and you have absolutely no idea where to even begin. If this sounds like your situation, then you might be asking yourself some questions like:

• I’ve got this massive component to make, and 15 of the pins need to be connected to ground. How in the world do I do that without placing 15 different ground symbols? That’s going to make one cluttered schematic if I do.
• For those working on their first quad op amp, you might be suddenly bewildered that there’s more than one opamp in that DIP package. And not only that, you’ve now got 4 duplicate power and ground pins, which ones do I even need to connect?
• Or maybe you’ve got a huge chip that you need to create a symbol for, but by the time you’re done adding all of the parts to it, your schematic is filled to the brim. How in the world do I break up this part into multiple pages so my schematic is easier to read?

If you’re anything like us, then making the leap from beginner library creation to intermediate and even advanced parts creation is nothing short of overwhelming. You’re hoping there might be an easier way to connect all of those pins, to 1, 2, skip a few and get to your final 100. But the truth is, there’s no easy way around doing the work (unless you plan to use a third party library). The good news is, there’s an efficient way to make your multi-part components in Autodesk EAGLE.

Supercharge Your Component Creation Skills

Every PCB design tool out there does multi-part component creation a bit differently, so it can be confusing knowing where to start. Regardless of what tool you’re using though, the goal is always the same – to make your schematics as easy to read as possible when placing down symbols. To achieve this goal with multi-part components, you’ll need to put on your strategist hat and dive into the world of multi-sheet schematics.

So are you ready to supercharge your library creation skills in Autodesk EAGLE? We’ve got a free training webinar that will show you the ins and outs of multi-part component creation, and you’ll be a pro in no time.

What You’ll Learn

• Making multigates. You’ll learn how to efficiently create symbols and packages for components with multiple gates and high pin-counts.
• Assigning pins. You’ll learn how to easily assign single pins to multiple pads for both power and ground connectivity in multi-part components.
• Keeping it simple. You’ll learn the best practices from the EAGLE pros on how to organize high pin-count components, so your schematics are always easy to read.

We’ll be hosting this live webinar on July 11th at 2 pm EST for 30 minutes. It’s going to be a quick one, so buckle up and get ready to upgrade your component creation skills in Autodesk EAGLE!

Register here for our EAGLE Pro: Multi-Part Component Creation webinar.