I haven't been able to find many resources on designing schematic views of parts with large numbers of pins in Altium. The Symbol Wizard (Tools > Symbol Wizard), which allows you to copy and paste large numbers of pin names, and creating multiple sub-parts are certainly both helpful, but is there a good way to deal with large numbers of pins that are internally connected?
When a part has more than 100 ground connections, how do you represent them in a schematic view?
Best Answer
I've seen people represent parts like this by having dedicated pages for them. An entire page listing just 200 ground pins and 1.2V rail pins is not uncommon.
I would suggest not to put pins on top of each other in a PCB schematic (this is different form a functional schematic where you try and represent signal flow/dataflow). You want every pin to have a poin in the schematic. This way, when debugging, the person doing the debuging can always consult the PCB schematic to look what function a pin is (this can be very important when looking at say noise issues. "Is this pin next to this trace a digital pin carrying a lot of data and causing noise coupling into my analog rail? Oh, it's +1.2V, so I think it won't be the main cause")
When dealing with a part this large, it is important to split the part up into multiple blocks. Don't have one big yellow blob with 1000 pins on it. Something like a LVDS block, DDR block, POWER, etc.