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C++BOLD Reference Manual

8. Reference Designators

NB: The Style Guide contains Reference Designator Prefix Conventions.

Section Contents

8.1. Overview

Reference designators are used to identify parts during PCB layout. A reference designator consists of one or more letters followed by a number. The letters typically convey some information about the type of part, but CBOLD also allows the letters to convey information about the part's location in the design hierarchy.

For example, a standard schematic capture application might assign the following reference designators:

These reference designators have the form shown below. Each field contains one or more characters:

CBOLD can assign reference designators of the form above, but it also allows assignments such as:

CBOLD reference designators have the form:

Again, the Prefix and Number fields each contain one or more characters. The Base field contains zero or more characters. If the designer does not specify a Base, designators have the same format as the standard two–field designator.

As described below, the ultimate Base for a part is the concatenation of the assigned Bases of its owner module(s).

When a design uses Bases, its reference designators are hierarchical, and the automatic assignment of Numbers restarts with 1 for each Base.

CBOLD provides the following functions for assigning reference designators:

Except for SetReferenceBase(), the above functions are typically called only for the Root module, e.g.:

Root.AssignReferenceDesignators();   // assigns reference designators in Root and all of its member modules