Symbols, footprints and Altium designer

[lilltroll]

As you may have noticed, many of the new board designs made by XMOS is made In Altium designer, one example is the SliceKIT.

For the Slice kit and some of the slices the schematics and board files are available in Altium format. But as it is now, other dependencies as the symbol library etc. is not included.

During the era with the old XMOS homepage you could find Mentor Graphics footprints to download.

Right now you do not find any match searching for symbol or footprints at xmos.com

I have been in contact via tickets with XMOS and asked about symbols, footprints and Altium libraries. The reply was:

We do not generate the Altium symbol library by default, so we are not able to share that today. However as I understand it is possible for you to extract the symbol from the Altium design database and effectively generate a library.

The reason that we do not provide symbol libraries today is that we have historically been concerned about the symbols being imported to other packages and errors being introduced. Though maybe we are just being paranoid.

I think this would be a good discussion for the forum, to pole the level of usefulness of an Altium only symbol library for XMOS devices.

I understand that XMOS cannot supply symbols and footprints to all possible formats of ECAD programs. Altium has an export/import function for many other ECAD program but typically the more expensive program cannot export/import to Eagle or KiCad.

Myself, (that is using Altium) - thinks that it would be a good Idea to share the hardware files from each new design including it's dependencies that is already available. That at least gives us an opportunity to convert it to other ECAD formats and reuse proven designs.

Reusing an already proven design saves a lot of time and money.
An example is that you would first build an AVB prototype based on SliceKIT and 2 Ethernet Slices + 1 Audio Slice to provide a daisy-chained AVB. The next step would be to reuse as much as possible, and remove the parts that you do not need to get you first evaluation prototpye and Functional prototype.

My question is: What do you think about this ? How should symbols, footprints and libraries be managed for XMOS processors and the different boards?


PS. Anyone having an Altium symbol library for the new FB217 chips? DS.

[ahenshaw]

I certainly expect that the XMOS symbols and footprints should be made available in some electronic format. Hopefully, it would be some format that already has support for translation to other systems. Personally, I'd like to see KiCad as a supported format.