Orcad Capture 15.7 and BOM generation with hierarchical designs

You aren't doing anything wrong. It's OrCad Crapture that is terminally broken. Forget hierarchical designs. You'll sleep much better and get something useful done, too.

Un bel giorno krw digitò:

I know. I always try to steer away from hierarchical designs, but this time I can't avoid them. Apparently nobody uses them seriously though, there are no other explainations for these limitations.

The only way I've found to do this until now is to delete (!) all the other pages except the one I'm interested to (!!) and then generate the BOM of the entire design. And needless to say, page deletion is not undoable, so it's necessary to discard changes, reload the design and do the same thing for each page. Just moving the pages temporarily to other schematics doesn't work: when you move a page containing hierarchical blocks, Orcad "forgots" all the annotations and part references (apparently the instance data is associated with the page position in the schematic, not with the page itself).

This is so incredibly wrong. I'm wondering if it's possible to do this thing by writing some kind of macro or plugin, but something tells me that it would be a waste of time.

I like hierarchical designs. VHDL is sorta that way. ;-) Crapture is just broken so badly that it's not worth trying. I just spent a month or two on a design that I had to convert back to flat. There is just enough hierarchical stuff in Crapture to make you think it should work. Then when you get to the end, Cadence gives you the middle finger.

It's worse than that. It can't push signal names down into the hierarchy. They end up with the names of the low level block not the higher level. THere is no way to track stuff down and little things like diff-pairs get totally lost.

It's a waste of time with Crapture. Other packages work better, or so I hear.