Embedded Board Array Documentation Layers

[CircuitWarrior]

Hi,

In Altium Designer (Version 15.1.16), I created an additional PcbDoc for panelizing my PCB.
This worked pretty well, but now I want to add some documentation Layers to the panel.

The Problem is: I used "Mechanical 15" and "Mechanical 16" in the single PCB (the not panelized one) as documentation layers and I want to use the same layers for the panelized one. Unfortunately, in this case Altium Designer uses the data of the documentation layers of the single PCB aswell (Take a look at the images <- I blurred the headers!).

Has anybody a clue how this needs to be done in Altium?

[robertferanec]

I do not use Altium Panelization, so I do not know the answer, but I am very interested to know how other people do it. Please, CircuitWarrior, when you figure it out, let us know. Thank you.

[CircuitWarrior]

I now solved my issue (despite it's not the best solutiom IMHO)..
I placed the documentation of PCB / Panel on different layers.
Example: Documentation of PCB on layer 15, documentation of Panel on layer 16. This did the trick for me...

[robertferanec]

CircuitWarrior thank you very much for sharing.

[Lorien]

@ CircuitWarrior: I did the same thing! That's because some of the informations in the PCB documentation are NOT the same like those used for panel. For example, the X and Y dimensions of your PCB will be different than those used for your panel so you want to keep them separated! I did a Word file with corresponding mechanical layers used for both PCB and Panels alike just to keep track of them and avoid confusions. On my latest design, this "map" shows like this:

I'm not convinced either that is the best approach but it happened that sometimes I had to save some of my temporary work on the PCB design but I wished not be seen on the panel... that's why was "temporary". Now, how would you do that since the Panel with copy all the layers of your PCB design and duplicate them accordingly to your panel requirements?

[HazelMiki]

Hi..i am a new user here. By profession i am a hardware design engineer and sometime uses the Altium designer for PCB desiging. Actually i am also confused about the Altium Panelize. I just want to know what it is and what are the feature it contains?
And also what do you mean by Mechanical 15 and Mechanical 16 layers?

printed circuit board assemblies

[robertferanec]

Altium Panelization feature lets you to create a panel with multiple copies of your PCB. Normally I do not use it, as you can simply specify how you would like to create the panel in Manufacturing notes, but it can be sometimes useful. You can also read some info on Altium pages, e.g.: http://techdocs.altium.com/display/A...ancements))_AD

Because I do not use the Altium Panelization, I only can guess, CircuitWarrior added a special layer to his panel (by default called in Altium as Mechanical Layer 16) which describes the panelization. The Mechanical layer 15 is used for manufacturing notes of the individual PCBs.