altiumpcbport
I´m new to Altium Designer. It seems like AD can´t use Off Sheet Connectors for hierarchical design, so I want to change all Off Sheet Connectors to Ports.
Is there an easy way to do this? Btw: There are a lot of Off Sheet Connectors in the design.
How can I use NetLabels in the hierarchical design? Somehow only Ports appear as Sheet Entries.
Thank you.
I'm not sure a good solution exists. You could add a second VHDL file that instantiates your first VHDL file's entity with the appropriate generic map. Then you could just place that second-level VHDL file onto the schematic.
Not ideal, but it maintains reusability, as you can just make new second-level files for every different size you want, and you only have to change the first-level file to affect all instantiations.
With Altium, if you're using a hierarchical design you will always have a single top sheet. Yet, why not simply add another sheet to the top sheet. We do you want to use Off-Sheet connectors instead of ports and connect the two sheets to each other.
This way you can put various parts to multiple sheets. The sheets are only connected using their ports which also helps with explaining the data flow (what is required where).
Best Answer
I would beg to differ with the answers posted here, but Altium absolutely has the ability to do what you're trying to do.
Because people sometimes use different names than others for the same thing, I'm just going to show a basic example, not necessarily tailored to your question, but you should be able to modify this easily to suit your needs.
The key to the solution is the Smart Paste tool.
Lets say I have a bunch of ports and I'd like to paste them onto nets of the same name. Simply select and Copy.
Click Edit -> Smart Paste
Here I chose paste as net labels and wires:
The final result:
As you can see from the second image, you can paste as Ports, Net Labels, even as Sheet entries where you can paste them onto a hierarchy.
This is very useful for connecting say a connector block up to a new hierarchy with a large number of nets. For example, from the same original Copied material, I pasted this onto a sheet symbol.
I trust you can modify this to suit your original question.