Active BOMs
- Matthew McCauley
Altium Designer includes a feature for projects called “Active BOMs,” which are a fully integrated BOM tool that can automatically update to include all parts used in a design, as well as poll sellers for most recent pricing. We require using these for projects being released for fabrication & purchase.
CONTENTS
Background
BOMs in Altium are designated with .BomDoc
The distributor search feature of Altium Designer is provided via Octopart.com, which is part of why it is quite good.
Addressing Errors in ActiveBOM
Missing MPNs
Some parts will appear without a MPN and therefore will not autofill with distributor results.
Adding an MPN should have been completed when first making the part. This issue can be addressed by adding an associated MPN within the part in the vault.
Simply click “Add” and select the correct MPN, which should also contain a few SPNs (supplier part numbers). If no SPNs are available, you should confirm the MPN isn’t something slightly different from what you searched for (sometimes SPNs include the packaging skew which will limit your results).
Out of Date Components
This warning is fixed by updating your project from libraries. It is a good practice to address these to ensure your board has the latest footprint, pinout, etc.
No Results
This is what will occur when a part is truly out of stock. You should however manually confirm this as sometimes it will appear that a valid MPN has been provided, but this is not actually the case.
In this case, adding a dash in the part number provides SPNs that are actually up to date and show the part is indeed in stock. I found this correct MPN via a quick check on Octopart.
You can keep both just in case.
Manual Solutions
Sometimes manual solutions are necessary, most often due to parts acquired via sample programs or sponsorships, but also for parts that are available only via direct quote.
Most importantly, a price break and available quantity must be set. For free items I typically just set a negligible price and set the quantity to whatever was received in the sample or donation.
Ranking Suppliers
The NER vault has already been setup to limit results to suppliers that are trustworthy/workable for us and limit to USD pricing. By default the ActiveBOM will sort results by cheapest, including price breaks. Sometimes we would prefer to limit how many suppliers we use to save on shipping. To make this clear in the BOM we can override the ranking completed by Altium.
Altium will still use colors to show that other suppliers are more or less recommended (due to supply, price, etc), but your override will now be forced to the back.
Ordering from ActiveBOM
There are some steps to keep in mind when ordering from an Altium ActiveBOM.
Ensure you hit “Refresh”
Export the BOM to upload to websites