Customizing the Bill of Materials

[MahtabZ]

Hello again!

In keeping with my goal of offering helpful advice to Multisim and Ultiboard users, this week’s blog post will be on a handy tool that Multisim offers – generating reports; specifically, a Bill of Materials report. This useful tool is an aid in the manufacturing process.  It lists the components used in your design, and provides a summary of the components needed to manufacture the circuit board.

To generate a Bill of Materials report for your circuit file, select Reports>>Bill of Materials.  The Bill of Materials window will open, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Bill of Materials window

As you can see, this report lists each component’s Quantity, Description (including the type of component and its value), RefDes, Package (footprint), and Type.

A useful feature of the Bill of Materials report is “Export to Microsoft Excel” (4^th button along the top of the window). This gives you an Excel file that you can print, save, or send to colleagues.

You can even add your own User Fields, which will show up as extra columns in the Bill of Materials report. To do this, go  to Tools>>Database>>Database Manager. Click the User field titles tab. From here, you can add or delete user fields. I am going to add a new field called “Max Temp”, as in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Adding new user fields

If we click Close and return to the Bill of Materials report (Reports>>Bill of Materials), we can see that the new user field “Max Temp” is a column, shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Bill of Materials report withour new user field

Now “Max Temp” is an attribute of every component in our design, and I can change the Max Temp attribute of any component in my database. Once again, go to Tools>>Database>>Database Manager and click the Components tab. Choose the desired partfrom the database and scroll to the right until you can see the “Max Temp” column. As you can see in Figure 4, I can change the value of this attribute formy chosen component.  This value is saved with the component in the database for use in other files, as well.

Figure 4: Changing the Max Tempattribute of a component

Alternatively, you can just right-click any component already placed in your design and choose Properties. Go to the User fields tab and change the value of Max Temp there.

I hope this mini-tutorial on the Bill of Materials report in Multisim has been helpful.  Thanks for reading!

Mahtab