Devices > Placement of a Device or Ground Device in a Slot

Placement

of Ground Devices in Slots

Ground devices are placed separately from other devices since their optimal location depends on the physical location of any connected devices.

See Grounds and Ground Wiring Flow Using Ground Design Functionality for more information about the overall workflow when using ground devices.

You can either:

Manually place ground devices one at a time. See Manually Placing a Normal or Ground Device in a Slot.
Have the system place all available unplaced ground devices from a particular logical design simultaneously or place all available unplaced ground devices for all associated logical designs simultaneously. See either: Automatically Placing all Unplaced Ground Devices from a Particular Logical Design.

Automatically Placing all Unplaced Ground Devices.

If you place all ground devices simultaneously or automatically place a single ground device, the system uses the rules and constraints that you have defined to select the slots in which it places the ground devices.

Note

You can place a device automatically or manually in multiple slots if each instance is mutually-exclusive. For example, a battery may be placed in a particular slot in one vehicle configuration but be placed in a different slot in another vehicle configuration. You can also place a device in one slot multiple times using option expressions. This enables the device to have a different footprint depending on the configuration. See Variant Placement of a Device for examples.

Each ground device being placed is treated in the following ways:

If there are one or more “Option place by Attribute/Property” constraints that match the ground device, it is placed in all these matching slots with the specified variant option expression. This occurs regardless of whether you have placed any attached, non-ground devices yet. If there are two or more connectors, the connector is chosen using Optimized Ground Placement. If you do not have a license for optimized ground placement, the device is still placed but it is mapped to one of the connectors without using ground optimization. This is exactly what happens when you place a normal device in a slot with multiple connectors. Caution A variantly placed ground does not necessarily mean a ground that is located in two or more locations. It is possible for the software to state that a ground is variantly placed if it is placed in two or more slots, or if it is placed in a single slot but is available only with specific configurations.
If there is a single “Place by Attribute/Property” constraint that matches the ground device, the system places it accordingly, regardless of whether you have placed any attached, non-ground devices yet.
If there are multiple “Place by Attribute/Property” constraints that match the ground device, it is placed according to Optimized Ground Placement. If you do not have Optimized Ground Placement available, the ground device is not placed and a warning is generated.
If placement of a ground device fails, a message displays on a Placement tab in the Output Window. It details the name of the device and the reason it could not be placed. Note The “Ground device that breaks placement rule” and “Placement conflict” design rule checks are available to identify any issues after the placement of ground devices.

Parent Topic:

Placement of a Device or Ground Device in a Slot