The first thing we’ll do in Altium is to create a new schematic library by going to File -> New -> Library -> Schematic Library. However, I’ve created nearly 500 symbols like this, so I have a bit of experience that helps me get work done fast!

If the data in the datasheet didn’t need so much cleanup, it would have been around 4-5 minutes. It took me just over 7 minutes to create this 144 pin part which is a little slow for me. Looking at the datasheet for this part, the pin out table (5.1, ) is not ideal for this process, but that’s OK-datasheets are rarely ideal for creating symbols.īefore going into detail on how to create this component, I ran through it myself to make sure I wouldn’t miss any steps as I wrote the article. Copy and pasting the pin descriptions for every pin on this package would be time consuming, boring, and error-prone, so let’s not do that! It looks like a nice microcontroller in a LQFP-144 package. I then sorted by the quantity available, and the winner is an NXP MK64FN1M0VLQ12. To find a part to use for this article, I headed over to Digi-Key and looked in the Embedded - Microcontrollers category for an in-stock ARM Cortex M series microcontroller with onboard FLASH and more than 100 pins of GPIO. I’ll be using Google Sheets, but Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice work just fine. NET flavor as it has a few neat features.

Some knowledge of Regular Expressions.

This article will be looking at a PDF datasheet.

A good datasheet, or a plain text pin definitions file.

Pre-requisitesīefore we get started, you’ll need a couple of things: In this article, I want to show you how you can leverage some of the tools in Altium to create your own symbols quickly. People are often surprised when I tell them it only takes a few minutes to make a schematic symbol using Altium, even if the part has a high pin count. My open-source Altium component library contains hundreds of schematic symbols, supplying over 100,000 components for use.

Altium schematic library