How to Add Rooms to Your Altium Layout: Enhancing Your PCB Design with Room Features

Adding rooms to your Altium layout is a powerful way to organize your PCB design, particularly in complex projects. In Altium Designer, "Rooms" are logical groupings of components or circuitry on a schematic or PCB—helping you manage system blocks, facilitate reuse, streamline variant management, and automate object placement. Here’s how to add rooms to your layout:

1. Create the Schematic: Start by drafting your complete schematic in Altium Designer. As you build out functional blocks (e.g., power supply, microcontroller, IO), keep in mind which sections should be grouped into rooms.
2. Define Designators: Assign reference designators to components you want to group. Rooms are usually created per schematic sheet or via the Design > Rooms menu.
3. Update the PCB: After completing your schematic, run the ‘Design > Update PCB Document’ command.
4. When prompted, Altium creates a new Room corresponding to each schematic sheet or variant block.
5. Create or Edit a Room Manually:In the PCB editor, go to Design > Rooms > Define From Selected Components to manually assign components to a new Room.
6. Rooms appear as colored polygons on the layout, typically with a label showing the Room name.
7. Adjust Room Properties:Right-click on the room border and select Properties to rename, resize, or recolor your Room for improved organization and visibility.

Rooms let you easily manipulate grouped components—move, copy, or even clone sets of placement constraints across projects. As a designer, I often see rooms as virtual partitions that echo spatial zoning in room planner layouts for interiors: keeping functionally related elements together enhances clarity and workflow efficiency. Treating your PCB’s functional blocks much like interior rooms can help ensure logical flow, accessibility, and optimal use of "design space."

Tips 1:

Double-click a room's border in the PCB editor to instantly view or fine-tune which components are included—ideal for reorganizing or troubleshooting.

FAQ

Q: Can I create multiple rooms for the same types of circuitry?

A: Yes. Altium allows you to assign as many rooms as needed, even for duplicated functional blocks, making multi-channel design easier.

Q: How do I delete or remove a room from my PCB?

A: Select the room's border and press 'Delete' or use the right-click context menu to remove unwanted rooms.

Q: Can Altium automatically assign rooms based on my schematic pages?

A: Absolutely. When you push the schematic to PCB, the tool will suggest rooms per schematic sheet if "Generate Rooms" is enabled.

Q: Are rooms visible in the final PCB production files?

A: No. Rooms are only a design-time organizational tool and do not appear in Gerber or manufacturing outputs.

Q: Can I constrain component placement within rooms?

A: Yes. You can specify rules and constraints for each room, such as specific layer usage or clearance requirements, helping with advanced design control.