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How to Compare PCB Design Schematics in Altium 365

Zachariah Peterson

| 已创建：August 12, 2022 | 已更新：February 5, 2025

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A design project doesn’t appear out of nowhere. The design process spreads over time, and project documents change. Schematic documents gradually become more complex, new functional blocks appear, and already finished parts can be modified and updated.

The need for compare

When the project is released and a series of boards is manufactured, adjustments will probably be made and a new release will be performed.

It is always useful to be able to track the evolution of a project. The Altium 365 platform allows not only to store all the intermediate versions of documents, but also has a powerful built-in tool for comparing documents, particularly schematics.

Project history

You can access project history directly in Altium Designer (from the Projects panel) or in the Altium 365 Workspace browser interface.

The project history is represented as an axis going from the bottom to the top that starts when the project was created and ends at its current state. The axis contains commits with a brief description of the changes made.

How to launch comparison

Select the “Compare Schematic to” command and a commit you want to compare it to. It can be a previous commit, or any other commit.

After selecting an option, a web page with comparison results being loaded will open. You can either wait for the operation to complete or simply close the window. The results will not be lost - you will receive an email that will contain a link to the comparison result page. The process of generating results may take some time!

In case you decide not to wait for the result right now, you will receive an email with a link:

Comparison window overview

The comparison page consists of two main regions: the Differences panel where all changes are grouped and listed, and the main viewing area with graphical representation.

Changed component example

Let’s take a closer look at the description of one of the differences - component replacement

Changed net example

Example with changes in one net:

Detailed description:

green “+” - pin is connected to the net
red “-” - pin is excluded from the net

Pin designations are clickable links!

Visualization of changes

The green objects were added, the yellow ones were edited, and the red ones were deleted.

In addition to the detailed text description in the Differences panel, the visualization of these changes is also very interesting.

Crossprobing

When you click on an object in the graphical field, it activates the corresponding line in the Differences panel.

Text search

There is another interesting feature. It is possible to perform a text search for the content of modifications in the Differences panel.

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关于作者

Zachariah Peterson拥有学术界和工业界广泛的技术背景。在从事PCB行业之前，他曾在波特兰州立大学任教。他的物理学硕士研究课题是化学吸附气体传感器，而应用物理学博士研究课题是随机激光理论和稳定性。他的科研背景涵盖纳米粒子激光器、电子和光电半导体器件、环境系统以及财务分析等领域。他的研究成果已发表在若干经同行评审的期刊和会议论文集上，他还为多家公司撰写过数百篇有关PCB设计的技术博客。Zachariah与PCB行业的其他公司合作提供设计和研究服务。他是IEEE光子学会和美国物理学会的成员。

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