Kicad Hierarchy Is Key!

 Kicad is great.

But sometimes...one sheet is just not plenty.

So to make your incredibly cool schematic more manageable, splitting portions of the system into blocks is vital! Below I have a quick tutorial for how to make a hierarchical sheet (took me a couple of google searches to figure out at first).

Here's the video (4 minutes):



(And if embedded doesn't work: video)

And a text tutorial:

1. Go to... Click create Hierarchical Sheet and draw a rectangle of appropriate size. The size of the rectangle can be changed by right clicking on the sheet symbol and selecting "Resize Sheet".
2. Right click on the newly created block and click Enter Sheet.
3. Now you can create a lovely schematic for one of your system's sub blocks.

Now you may ask, "Andrey, how do we link this schematic to the top schematic?".

Well, it's quite easy. Simply click "Create a Hierarchical Label", write the name of your I/O pin and connect it to the circuit. Right clicking and pressing "Leave Sheet" will get you back into the top-level schematic. There you can import the labels for the sub module's ports and move them to an appropriate location on the block's symbol.

With this approach, systems of arbitrary complexity can be designed with ease. It's quite easy to split the daunting task of a huge system into manageable blocks.

Oh and another trick. If you made a circuit on the top-level (or any other sheet) that you want to copy into a hierarchical sheet, the steps are outlined below:

1. Select the circuit of interest, right click and press copy selection.
2. In the target hierarchical sheet click paste and the original circuit will appear.
3. Original circuit can now be removed from the top-level schematic.

Hopefully this brief tutorial will help those of you starting to create designs with lot's of ICs, buses and passives.

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Andrey Miroshnikov

Your local digital designer/systems engineer ;) (Not qualified yet...)
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EDIT: Turns out the sheet symbol can be re-sized, duh! Also I was told the power connections carry through the hierarchy and hence, hierarchical labels for "GND" and "VDD" for example, are unnecessary.