Modular Schematics might benefit modular board layout if the “Room” concept is passed through for both manual and auto-layout. This picture shows “schematic rooms” in Blue with their Text Room Title.
What brought this up is I tried to use PCB Editor Place->Auto-Place Footprints->Place Selected Footprints and was unsettled when it scattered parts all over the board, particularly interface parts bridging “rooms” in my original schematic design.
I found an earlier thread on this subject Auto-place components where they appear in the schematic which discussed one solution of placing each room on a separate hierarchical page. This would obfuscate the ability to understand the whole system with over-compartmentalization of the design, similar to trying to understand a design by just inspecting the BOM. I thought the idea of using schematic placement information as a starting point for PCB placement to have invaluable merit for relative connectivity information. The information is there, why not use it to optimize the “start” point for the placement process step?
What would be more useful to me is if I could constrain part location to room physical boundaries on the PCB for this Auto-placement activity by Room Name/ID, similar to what I’ve done in the schematic. For some “interface parts” the physical placement rooms might be allowed to overlap.
I read the manual for this component placement function and the words describe the type of feature I need to reduce effort/increase productivity, but there is no way to constrain the focus of the tool other than “Parts off board” and “Selected parts”.
On larger schematics, I tend to categorize smaller sections as “Rooms”. In decades past each of these rooms might have been a discrete schematic page where things like switching power supply components had their own page for a design using discrete components. Today, parts are more integrated/complex, and more of the design can fit on one page.
Using newer more modular approaches to design much of the switcher is now contained in an IC package and a handful of external components are needed, so there is no need for a separate schematic page. With this kind of design approach, several “pages” can be consolidated into a schematic “Room” on the same page with only a few connections connecting multiple rooms. I.e. a few signal or power lines like analog input, I2C or SPI bus, a few DIO’s, or an assortment of custom signal lines, etc. These signals can use global labels which allow for easy movement of sections to other pages on a larger hierarchial design, simple or complex.
Layout effort, whether manual or automated can be reduced if room information can be passed along to the next design stage in the form of a “Room”.
These rooms might have names like; “CPU”, “Supply”, “Display”, “wave shaping”, “protection”, “Do not populate”, and “Test Fixture”, all related to the design and various adaptations of the design.