Power plane net name in multichannel design.

[brs]

Hello,

I have a multichannel pcb design. In this design there are 8 analog chips which their analog and digital ground planes are connected with 0R resistor at single point. I have a single device sheet for all channels. Everything is okay except analog planes. Each chip must have seperate analog ground but Altium connects them according to my schematic. I couldn't find a solution to give a different AGND anotation for diffent channels. Please see attached picture.

How can I do that? Is there anybody have an idea?
Thansk.

[willyduke]

You shouldn't use a power port like AGND for your channels, because they are global, instead connect your analog ground to a sheet port and from there you can separate them like AGND[1 ..N]

[brs]

I did not understand exactly how I should do. I have many analog ground connections in base sheet. Do I have to change them with sheet port? Could you share a image?
Thanks.

[robertferanec]

I do not normally use Hierarchical designs, but maybe, did you try Project -> Project Options -> Options ... and then set Net Identifier scope to: Strict Hierarchical? But I am not sure if that will help ... you can try.

[willyduke]

Here is an example , as you see inside the channel i don't put a power port for the analog ground, you can do it in the base schematic if you want to label them but you have to give them different name, lets say AGND1,AGND2,.., etc. In this solution you can leave "Automatic (Based on project content)", or choose "Hierarchical(.." in projects options.

[brs]

Robert, I know "Strict Hierarchical" but it causes a lot of errors.

willyduke, thank you for your effort. I found this in the altium documentation and it worked for me.


I just added a dummy port and no erc directive and I see the AGNDs of all channels separately in pcb net list.

[robertferanec]

Awesome! Thank you brs and willyduke for sharing your solution. Very interesting. I didn't know that.