R&D Staff Tip of the Month

The R&D Staff Tip of the Month allows the software developers and quality assurance staff at National Instruments Electronics Workbench Group to showcase the features of NI Multisim that they know will be helpful to the design engineer.

R&D Staff Tip of the Month

A feature that is useful for board-level designers in NI Multisim and NI Ultiboard is the ability to easily cross-probe between the circuit schematic and board layout. As designs grow in complexity, cross-probing allows me to easily find a part in a Multisim schematic by simply selecting its associated footprint in Ultiboard.

The tight integration between Multisim and Ultiboard proves to be a valuable tool when placing adjacent component footprints in Ultiboard. I can select any footprint in Ultiboard and the cross-probe tool highlights the component in its schematic form in Multisim. This allows any engineer to appropriately, and confidently, approach defining board-level designs.

See for Yourself

To see how to use cross probing while designing with Multisim and Ultiboard we can use a shipping example.

1. Select Start > All Programs > National Instruments > Circuit Design Suite 10.0 > Multisim to open Multisim.
2. To open one of the Multisim shipping examples select File > Open Samples… and select the Speechfilter.ms10 file. Click on the OK button to open.

We now transfer the file to Ultiboard, to view this design in both states; schematic in Multisim and layout in Ultiboard.

3. Select Transfer > Transfer to Ultiboard 10. Save the netlist file (use the default name of Speechfilter.ewnet) and click on the Save button.
4. Ultiboard will open a number of dialogs in order to define the various design constraints. For this example click on the OK button to utilize the defaults.  The Import Netlist Action dialog box now appears. Again select the defaults by clicking on the OK button.

You now have the Speechfilter.ms10 design open as both a circuit schematic and as a board layout. Looking at the board layout we notice that our design now exists as a number of different footprints interconnected with yellow net connections. As a designer it is much more difficult to understand what each of these components represents as a footprint than in its schematic form. This is an excellent opportunity to use cross-probing.

5. Select a footprint in Ultiboard (for this example select component C1)
6. Select Tools > Highlight Selection in Multisim  (as seen in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Cross-probing from Ultiboard

7. The Multisim window will now become active and will automatically highlight the C1 component (as seen in Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Finding the component in Multisim

I can now easily begin placing my footprint component (C1 in this case) and immediately begin defining which adjacent components to place next, such as C2 and R1 as pictured in Figure 2.

Cross-probing is an easy tool that can be immediately incorporated into board-level design with National Instruments Multisim and Ultiboard.

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