Library Altium
Kristin Banyas
The library is production proven, footprints are designed to the manufacturers specifications so parts fit and reflow perfectly. Components pick and place correctly thanks to correct component centroid information.
Cloud hosted database gives you the largest selection of components from any database library available. Completely open source, and free to use in commercial projects. Save yourself the time of building libraries, get back to the business of designing electronics.
Celestial Altium Library provides a high quality, free, open source cloud hosted Altium Library with over 100,000 components. Save time on your next project by using the largest open source Altium Library.
An electronics design is a collection of connected components. The rewarding part of product development is coming up with cool ways of solving those engineering challenges and connecting those components to craft your unique design.
However, a large part of the work, and to many designers, the more tedious part, is creating the components. While it might not be exciting, the components become a valuable resource for your company, and it is essential that they accurately represent the real-world component.
The component that you buy and solder onto the board or use in a wiring harness is the real component, but that component has to be modeled in each of the electronic design domains in which you want to use it.
Depending on what type of design implementations you plan to perform, your component could include a symbol for the schematic, a simulation model for the circuit simulator, an IBIS model for signal integrity analysis, a pattern or footprint for PCB layout, and a 3D model for visualization, 3D clearance checking, and export to the mechanical CAD domain.
Effective management of component data is essential for electronic design, and the management of components used in a design has always been a fundamental element of the Altium design software. As the software evolved over years, the component management methodologies traveled a long way, from simple discrete libraries of schematic and PCB models, through database libraries, to the Workspace components providing representation of design components to a wider product development arena, along with cutting-edge and easy-to-use features for unparalleled collaboration during the entire design process.
Components stored in a connected Workspace that provides a single source of up-to-date and standardized component data for your entire design team. Parametric and faceted search capabilities allow you to find and place the parts you need efficiently and quickly. These components are tightly coupled with the real-world manufactured part and supply chain data accessible at design time, offering a significant improvement in terms of procurement cost and time when manufacturing the assembled product.
With an Altium 365 Workspace, you'll benefit from a richer set of collaborative features, including Global Sharing. And because it is cloud-based, you get the latest version of the Workspace without having to worry about manual upgrades.
The real-world component that gets mounted on the board or used in the production of the wiring harness is represented as a schematic symbol during design capture and as a PCB footprint for board design (optionally, with a 3D model for visualization, 3D clearance checking, and export to the mechanical CAD domain). A design component can also include a simulation model for the circuit simulator and an IBIS model for signal integrity analysis. To provide a representation of design components to a wider product development arena, one or more Part Choices can be added to it.
Components for your design project can be created and placed in your company's Workspace library. They are placed through the Components panel, which uses Altium Designer's advanced component search engine.
A new Workspace library component is created using the Component Editor, where you can manually define all component data (domain models, parameters, part choices, etc.) or use data acquired from the Manufacturer Part Search panel.
In the Create new component dialog that opens, choose a component type. If there is a component template linked to the selected component type, it will be used to predefine the component with the data from it.
Click the Advanced Settings control to define or change some other component details such as the component's Id used for the saved component in the Workspace and Folder in the target Workspace where the component will be saved.
In the Parameters region of the Component editor, define further component details: standard parameters, URL links to website pages (for example, a manufacturer's website), and links to datasheets (in any format).
In the Models region of the Component editor, add links to saved (or created on-the-fly) domain models for use by the component. A component can have one schematic symbol and multiple PCB footprint and simulation models, or it can have one harness wiring model. A component must have at least one model.
With the component defined, select the File Save to Server command from the main menus to save the component to the Workspace. The Edit Revision dialog will appear, in which you can change the Name and Description and add release notes as required. The editor will close after the save.
A component can be defined using data provided by the Manufacturer Part Search functionality. Start typing in the Name field and select a matching manufacturer part or add a part choice to the component being defined, and the Use Component Data dialog will open providing controls for selecting data you would like to apply to the component being currently created/edited: name, description, parameters, models, and datasheets.
Component data can be acquired from manufacturer part search. An example of accessing the functionality by typing a component name in the Name field and selecting a matching entry from the pop-up list is shown here.
Altium Designer provides the ability to place components directly from a company database, by creating and using a Database Library. Placement is carried out from the Components panel which, after installing a database library, acts as a browser into your database.
An Altium Designer file-based library is an arbitrary collection of models or components. How the models or components are organized into libraries is up to you. You might structure your libraries around device suppliers, or you might cluster components by function, for example, with a library for all of the microcontrollers your company uses.
Schematic component symbols are created in schematic libraries (*.SchLib). The components in these libraries then reference footprints and other models defined in separate footprint libraries (*.PcbLib) and model files. As a designer, you can place components from these discrete component libraries or you can compile the symbol libraries, footprint libraries, and model files into integrated libraries (*.IntLib).
From a designer's perspective, a component gathers together all information needed to represent that component across all design domains, within a single entity. It could therefore be thought of as a container in this respect.
The features available depend on your Altium product access level. Compare features included in the various levels of Altium Designer Software Subscription and functionality delivered through applications provided by the Altium 365 platform.
And this just got me to an idea:
Something like the above would need some way of communicating your existing library to someone else, and one of the ways to do that is by printing all library symbols to a .pdf file.
Many datasheets are distributed in .pdf format and there are tools to help in KiCad with extracting data for schematic symbols from .pdf files.
You will start with single SchLib and PcbLib files. At some point later in time you will get problems with inconsistent parameters at which time you will look into other approaches. From then on you will probably want to use a DbLib or SvnDbLib (which is basically the same except the libraries are stored in SVN). With the increased usage of GIT do yourself a favor and store your libraries in GIT and use the DbLib approach. The celestial library is such a DbLib with libs stored in GIT.
Or you can go all-in with Altium and rely on their A365 product which in turn is .. who would have guessed it - libraries stored in GIT and a DbLib, built together with a nice interface and some goodies which are buggy.
I'm currently using Int.Lib because i like to have full control on my lib. Like adding few special notes on my components such as Fabrication code, referral, local base suppliers(Ozdi**n etc. )muadil etc.
In a previous chapter, we started to create a component that can be used with Altium 365 technology. We understand that you might want to use local libraries as you used to, but we strongly recommend that you use Altium 365 because it gives you a wide range of new features when working with components. This chapter shows an example of how to create a symbol and footprint in a local library. In the scope of this chapter, we will create a SchLib with a symbol for our component and in chapter 5.4 we will create a PcbLib with a footprint for it and complete the component creation.
Select File > New > Library > Schematic Library from the main menus to create a new local schematic library. The symbol editor will open in your design space. Open the Properties and SCH Library panels if they are not already open.
We need to define a name for the symbol and component. In the Design Item ID field (the name of the symbol) of the Properties panel, enter MBT3904DW1T1G. This name will be used when searching for the component in the Components panel.
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