DxVariantManager

Board Level Design Reuse

Many electronic products today are structured such that they can be manufactured from a single base design, with varying characteristics and feature sets based on customer and target market configurations. This practice enables rapid product differentiation and custom configurations.

The actual practice of creating and managing these types of electronic products during the board-design phase is typically a manual and error-prone process, usually involving the replication of the entire design database for each needed design variant. When a change is made, that change must be replicated by hand across the entire set of databases, with no guarantee of correctness or completeness. The component-substitution methods are also manual and often result in the substitution of the wrong part. Horror stories of the wrong polarization for substituted capacitors abound.

DxVariantManager is designed to solve these issues by implementing a design-variant strategy that uses a single design database and qualified component substitution.

View DxVariantManager datasheet

Highlights

• Enables board-level design reuse by supporting variations of a base design.
• Creates design variants by substituting form-fit-function compatible components and/or uninstalling components.
• Qualifies component substitution through DxDataBook to ensure substituted part is form-fit-function compatible.
• Stores all design variant data to ease the burden of making design changes across all variants.
• Includes intuitive spreadsheet-style interface.
• Generates bills of material for variant designs all at once or on a variant-by-variant basis.
• Facilitates multiple report outputs, including HTML.
• Rapidly creates variant clones from previously entered data.
• Generates variant schematic for documentation purposes.
• View DxVariantManager Datasheet

Single Design Database

Design database and change-control management is simplified by using a single design database for the entire set of design variants. The base design, which is the superset of all the variants, encapsulates all the data for the individual variants.

This has several advantages. When a change is made to the base design, all the variants are updated automatically. This eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone task of manually replicating changes in multiple design databases.

Another advantage is the ability to report and compare the variants to each other and to the base design. All documentation, including bills of material (BOMs), reports and schematics, are derived from a single, controlled source.

Qualified Component Substitution

One of the most catastrophic problems in the variant-creation process revolves around component substitution. This largely manual process often leads to the incorrect component being substituted. Common problems are wrong polarization, incorrect pin-outs, etc. These problems are exacerbated by having non-centralized, inconsistent libraries, often with wrong, outdated, or incomplete information. But even a good, centralized library does not ensure proper substitution, as the process is still manual.

DxVariantManager is integrated with DxDataBook to enable proper, qualified component substitution. To enable the substitution, you define and identify the attributes in your corporate library that cannot vary between components. Because they are kept in the DxDataBook configuration, these attributes can be different for each library classification (i.e., capacitors, resistors, ICs, etc.) and, different projects can use different definitions. During the component substitution procedure, DxVariantManager invokes the leading-edge search and match capabilities in DxDataBook to provide you with a list of the specific components that match your criteria.

Typical Product Usage

The first step is to configure DxDataBook to enable the qualified-component substitution. DxDataBook then runs in the background.

DxVariantManager is used with ViewDraw. When you open DxVariantManager on the base design, it populates its intuitive, spreadsheet interface with all the components in the design. From this, you can then create any number of variants in which you uninstall (unstuff) components and/or substituted different components.

"Uninstall" and "substitute" are a simple mouse click away. If you are substituting, DxVariantManager presents you with a dialog box of all the qualified substituted components, including a symbol preview.

Often, variants are more similar to themselves than they are to the base, so DxVariantManager makes it easy to clone variants to create new variants.

Components can also be grouped for use as a set. By grouping components together in a BOM-style item list, you can operate on the entire group or easily create a new item by defining one or multiple subgroups, each consisting of one or more components. This enables you to mark an entire group of common components as uninstalled or substituted.

DxVariantManager supports cross probing with ViewDraw. When you click on a component in DxVariantManager, it is highlighted in ViewDraw.

Once all the variants have been defined, you can then compare the variants in a table, create the variant BOMs, output several report styles (including HTML and plain text), and create variant schematics for documentation. The HTML output enables you to rapidly share all the design variant information in a web browser.