Functional blocks in Altium and Eagle PCB design

[mrinalmani]

Hello!
I have been working with Multisim and Ultiboard for years now.
Ultiboard has started becoming a pain in the neck for large designs.
I want to start with Altium and have a few questions.

1. Does altium support creation of component group to quickly replicate the relative position of components while creating other groups having the same components.
2. Can we copy the PCB route of one group to the other?
Please see the attachments... it will explain better what I mean to ask..

The layout in the figure shows two group of components. But I just had to route one of the group and for the other, I simply copied the path and the component position from the first group. So the second is an exact duplicate of the first.
Can this be done in Altium? Can it be done in Eagle?

 

[mtwieg]

I know that in Eagle there is no convenient way to copy layout sections. To do so you have to manually rename every copied net in the layout view, which is usually too time consuming to be worthwhile. It's one of Eagle's biggest weaknesses.

 

[toohec]

Yes, this can be done in Altium using "Rooms". It allows you to generate one instance of a layout and then quickly duplicate that layout for the additional identical circuit channels. You can also use a traditional copy/paste of the copper/components, but that requires a little more manual work afterwards to update the component designators to match with your schematic. Typically that just requires manually changing the reference designators on the pasted PCB components (the pasted components will have a new designator with a "_1" suffix), updating the project's components links, and updating your PCB from the schematic. However, if you are duplicating a circuit multiple times, it would be best to learn the rooms method.

 

[yokohama]

Yes you can do it in Altium.