I'm reproducing an existing design that has a number of copies of a circuit which is large enough that I want to use the multi-channel in Altium. I want to preserve the existing designators, but they look like this:
Sheet 1:
R100, R102, R103, Q100, CN100, U100, U101, etc.
Sheet 2:
R200, R202, R203, Q200, CN200, U200, U201, etc.
and so on for all sheets (identical aside from the designators). R100, R200, R300, etc. are all the same component type, as are Q100, Q200, Q300, etc.
Altium gives some flexibility for defining the component naming convention, but I don't see a way to accomplish the above. Is there a way to do this?
I could live with just doing a copy and paste of the circuit and updating the designators to match the existing design, but then I would lose the advantage of using the Copy Room Formats tool in layout, which is the main reason I want to make this a multi-channel design.
Best Answer
I believe while in the Schematic editor you can go to Tools --> Board Level Annotate:
In the new window hit the button that says "Annotate Options":
and for the "Naming Scheme" you would use the keyword for the component prefix ("U", "R", "C", etc), followed by the sheet number keyword, followed by the keyword for the component index (1, 2, 3, etc). I believe in your case this would be
$ComponentPrefix$SheetNumber$ComponentIndex.More information about these keywords can be found in the Altium documentation, a little over half way down the page.
Then click the "Annotate" --> "Annotate All" buttons:
And this is what the result will look like:
The project I used to create this example doesn't have multiple sheets, but you can trust that on sheet 2, the component indexes would start with 2 instead of 1 (in the above image).
Using this method, U24 (for example) on sheet 1 would have the designator
U124, R15 on sheet 2 would have the designatorR215, and so on.