How to Flatten a Hierarchical Design

[sphillipsT3N7F]

Hello All,

About a year ago I had made a design in Eagle 7.x making use of the hierarchical design modules as coming from Orcad/Altium tools this was a very powerful technique for more complex designs. After completion of the schematic capture I had found out that in board layout all components were prefixed with their Hierarchical module name (this resulted in reference designation 10+ characters long, which was obviously unusable on the PCB) I got around this by naming my modules in increment values 1->9 so that prefixes were limited to x: (ie 2:U1).

A year later I find myself modifying this design again and having continued issues and frustration fitting these unnecessary silk screens in sensible places on the PCB. I know I will be using this design a number of the times in the future and I am hating the realization that I will have to deal with this every time I modify the design for a new PCB. There is complex routing on the PCB (FPGA, DDR RAM, etc.) so it would take about a week of my time to copy the schematics over to a non-hierarchical design and re-route (which I simply cannot afford to do).

/rant

Anyways now to my question... is there a relatively quick method to take a hierarchical design with a number of modules and flatten it so that all components share the same numbering pool and are not prefixed with their module name?

Thanks, any suggestions would be appreciated.

[jorge_garcia · Accepted solution]

Hi @sphillipsT3N7F,

Thank you for coming onto the forums. At this point in time I regret to inform you that we don't have an easy way to flatten the hierarchy. However, with that said, we have big plans for hierarchy that are starting to be developed as we speak.

Our users were never fully satisfied by the current implementation and to be honest, neither were we. That's why this is going to be a big focus in the coming months, there is a lot of work to do there.

I'm going to put in an enhancement request for this to make sure it is included in the discussion.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[sphillipsT3N7F]

Hi @jorge_garcia,

I am glad to hear this is in the works, I very much enjoy hierarchical schematic capture and believe there is a lot of power in it, I would be happy to see this feature improved.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

use the power of design blocks!
make a block out of the parts you want to transfer, saveit and tthen place a copy into the sheet and board you want it in, that simple.

[Cynthia.MacLeod]

A year on, and this still doesn't seem to have had any traction.

"However, with that said, we have big plans for hierarchy that are starting to be developed as we speak."??

Really.

What happened?

Need an easy way of executing part renumbering based on hierarchy...

Wouldn't even mind if we could have a numerical prefix for a module...

e.g. MOD1:SUB2:C1 -> C121 or similar if you assigned 100 to MOD1.

Or a ULP to renumber and copy to a fake names layer like panelize?

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @Cynthia.MacLeod,

I hope you're doing well. What happened was that the scope of this project is extremely large, we are looking at spending a good chunk of the year restructuring the entire system that's why you haven't seen any changes. Why patch something if you are going to throw it out later.

With that said the first fruits of this labor will be coming out in the next few months: Hierarchical Busses. This is one of the foundations for the new system and it is pretty spectacular. EAGLE users think they know busses, this will change all that for the better.

Thank you for your patience and feel free to post again whenever you want an update. If I have something I'll share.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi @jorge_garcia ,

So it's been a few years since this post, has there been anything implemented to fix the module names inserting themselves into component names on the board? I'm having the same issue as OP with not needing the module name to appear for each device (I'm stuck with stuff like CONNECTORS: TP1 for a tiny little test point... makes no sense). Short of re-naming each and every component on the board or going back to a flat design, can you suggest a more effective path?

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

@Cynthia.MacLeod Did you ever find a way around this issue? I've got hundreds of components to re-name now, and I'm really not trying to do each and every one of them on their own.

[Cynthia.MacLeod]

I never found anything to 'flatten' the modules per se, but you can assign a numerical offset to the component numbers in a module under the properties of each instance.

So you can make the first instance start at 100, the second 200 etc., and in that case is doesn't use prefixes, it just adds the offset to the component numbers.

This does work 'fairly' well, although it can be confusing if you use the 1xx range to indicate the back of the board if you are mounting stuff double sided.