About Managing Components, Symbols, and Footprints

Design with Altium Designer saves and retrieves Altium Designer design data (project, schematics, and PCB) to 3DEXPERIENCE. When specifying a physical assembly and a PCB, the product structure is maintained on saving the design data to 3DEXPERIENCE. In order to build the product structure, Design with Altium Designer requires the Electronic Physical Components (EPCs) used in the design. Library management supports creation and maintenance of the EPCs and all its required data in 3DEXPERIENCE.

You can manage following Altium Designer library objects in 3DEXPERIENCE:

  • Components/symbols (as EPCs)
  • Symbols (as symbol objects)
  • Footprints (as footprint objects)
  • Intrinsic or embedded STEP models (as CGR 3D Model representations)
Note: You can handle these Altium Designer library objects distinctly. You can generate CGR models from the footprint. These are marked current at the time of save of the component or EPC. You can handle other models like simulation models together with and as part of Altium components.

Using Design with Altium Designer Library Management through the Electronic Component Editor you can:

  • Create new Altium Designer components/footprints and save them to 3DEXPERIENCE.
  • Open existing EPCs/footprints from 3DEXPERIENCE in Altium Designer.
  • Create new Altium Designer components/footprints by duplicating existing EPCs/footprints in 3DEXPERIENCE.
  • Update working library with latest information from 3DEXPERIENCE.
  • Place EPCs directly from the 3DEXPERIENCE SCH/PCB Library panel within Altium Designer into a schematic.
  • Add EPCs to the cache library.
  • Update the cache library with latest information from 3DEXPERIENCE.

It is restricted to Save and open Altium Designer library objects to and from 3DEXPERIENCE. It is restricted to components and footprints located in a user-specific working library.

However, you can import components and footprints from other libraries to the working library.

EPCs that are placed onto a schematic are, together with their respective footprints, automatically added to the cache library. The cache library acts as the central point to update component instances that are not yet linked to 3DEXPERIENCE with components in the cache library that are under 3DEXPERIENCE control. You can complete this update using existing Altium Designer functions and features.