Electronic – Altium Schematics: what does Locked function mean

altiumschematics

I am drawing a schematics in Altium Designer and faced this function when I double click on the components. I need to know when there is a component with different parts, ex: 4 parts. I have to assign the first part as Part 1/4 and the second part as 2/4 … etc

Do I need to Enable the Locked function or not ? And what does it mean ?

enter image description here

Best Answer

In short

Parts inside component

A Component may have more than one parts, for ex: LM324 has 4 op-amps inside. With the part option, you select which one to use. Altium will create netlist for the pins with the part you have selected.

Part locked

Now, when you annotate the schematic, Altium not only changes the component names with ? (for ex U?), but also the parts. This may cause trouble in PCB because it effects witch pins of the part is connected to the rest of the circuit. If you select "part locked", Altium will keep all locked parts with your selections. For ex: A component with locked enable, lets say U?/part2 will not change to U1/part1 when you annotate schematics. It will be something like Uxx/part2 always.

Related Topic