Yes, in Pulsonix you can swap equivalent gates and pins in the layout and then back-annotate those changes to schematic. Particularly useful for complex components like large FPGA, MCU, SoC.
Apart from packages containing multiple identical units, what other benefits would that system have?
The main advantage is having the most generic (i.e. clean) symbols and footprints with almost no duplication whatsoever and map them to each-other in the “part”. E.g. you might have 10s of symbols and 10s of footprints in your library which are mapped to 100s of parts which in turn are mapped to 1000s of components (if an ODBC database is used to retrieve component properties).
Dear cioma,
Thanks for your comment. The most compact and clean libraries, its a result of the chosen hierarchical order, or classes when put in OO design terms.
I know that being satisfied with the solution used, I will never invent the wheel, but I do not see anything wrong with how the library is organized in KiCad.
May be it is because I have never seen Pulsonix you mentioned at the beginning.
When I spend a week to select element I plan to use I then make a symbol for it with footprint linked. I have in symbol library only elements I have used. I’m sure that each symbol I place at schematic has everything correctly defined - need not to worry about it. I never modify any symbol at schematic. If I want to change 4k7 resistor to 5k6 I delete one and insert the second. That protects me against making a mistake like changing the 4u7 X7R capacitor to 10u without noticing that I need also to change footprint to bigger one.
I see my libraries being compact and clean.
I think most opamps for example have the same pinout. If you need to use one exotic opamp you will simply define new symbol for it. I don’t think library with such extra opamp symbol will be less compact than library containing for each element the information of its symbol pins mapping to footprint pins.
