Say I'm designing a device with a lot of repeated elements, like an 8-channel audio mixer. Each channel will have functional units that are identical and repeated, for example, an amplifier.
To keep the top-level schematic readable, my schematic capture software allows schematics to be hierarchical, where the top schematic has symbols which represent subcircuits.
An example:
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
What conventions are there for visually representing this? Are there conventions to give the reader of a schematic a hint that A1, A2, and A3 are not discrete components or ICs, but a circuit defined on another page?
What conventions exist for naming (for printing on the PCB) the discrete components that compose these sub-circuits? Would it make sense to concatenate the name of the symbol and the components, so in the example above I'd end up with A1R1, A1R2, A2R1, A2R2, ...? Is there a conventional prefix for the names of the symbols, A1-A3 in the example, which hints at their nature? (As C1 suggests a capacitor, etc...)