Electronic – How does your company manage hardware reuse?

project-management

At my company we do a lot of original hardware designs each of which are designed by only a small sub-section of our engineers. We are looking at ways to better document and distribute what has been done on each project so that information can be distributed and potentially reused. How does your company handle this?

Best Answer

Some EDA tools like the one I use, Altium Designer, provide methods to save varying portions of circuits to make them somewhat portable. For small circuits, you can use "Snippets", or for larger, multi-sheet reuse, "Device Sheets"

I don't know of any standard for hardware schematics (SPICE is too abstract; to my knowledge you can't tie it in with footprints, your part numbers, suppliers, their part numbers...) so any sort of reuse would be highly dependent the EDA package your company uses and the features it provides, or the organizational methods you implement surrounding it.