Is EDA dead? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: saardrimer
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 02:25:09 pm
content: Disclaimer:I RUN BOLDPORT(yet I think that my views on the industry I'm in are still valid)I've written this article about why I think EDA has run its course and we should be looking at what comes nexthttps://medium.com/@saardrimer/eda-is-dead-what-comes-next-is-exciting-cd5f3301402bThoughts?More of my writing on the topic of EDA is herehttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2013/05/the-myth-of-huge-component-library.htmlhttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2013/06/the-myth-of-verified-by-others-footprint.htmlhttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2013/06/the-end-of-myths-solving-one-of-our.htmlhttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2013/09/engineers-assemble.htmlhttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2014/01/so-you-want-to-start-eda-business.htmlhttp://www.boldport.com/blog/2015/2/5/a-farewell-to-eda

author: stmdude
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 02:38:04 pm
content: Funny how you fail to mention that you run Boldport.. I.e, this is basically an ad..

author: saardrimer
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 02:51:52 pm
content: Fixed. Now what do you think about the content?

author: stmdude
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 03:22:30 pm
content: I haven't read all of the articles, but..First off, I'm one of those "new generation of software enthusiasts coming from the software world" (not a direct quote, but close).I agree that the tools could be better (and not just nicer looking, plain better), but really, it hasn't been a big issue. I use KiCad for most of my stuff, and I have dabbled in Altium 15&16.It didn't take me long to become proficient enough to produce my first working boards, have them made, and assembled by myself.In fact, the learning-curve for producing my first "product" (and I use that word very loosely) was way smaller than what I expected from me actually venturing into a whole new profession.Whats limiting me right now is not the tools. It's my understanding of the physics involved in high-speed digital design. It doesn't seem like PCBmodE would help me with that part. Me getting off my ass and reading a few books on the subject would help though.As for the artistry in PCBs, I agree that the hand-layout designs of the 70s were beautiful in their own right, I find beauty in modern PCBs as well. Just as I think it required an interest in the matter to appreciate the old PCBs, I think the same is true today.I marvel at some of the boards I see today.. Server motherboards, with 2000+ pins per CPU and 20-or-so DIMM slots of 240pins, all running at >=1GHz. The people who design those boards are the gods amongst mere mortals to me.As for the "Big-3", I think Altium would take offence to not being one of them.But, you need to realize that they do a lot more than simply let you jot down schematics and design a PCB around it. Integration into production and supply systems, as well as ERM is something they've been doing for a long time already, and I haven't even seen mention of it on the KiCad mailing-lists.Those are functionalities that keep the factories going, the supply-chain moving and keeps the inventories to a minimum. All that saves _a lot_ of money for the companies that use that functionality.Things are changing though. KiCad is gaining a foothold, and it is evolving. Not quickly, and not always in the areas I would like to see, but there is progress.end-of-rant

author: saardrimer
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 03:30:08 pm
content: I agree with most of what you say. (BTW, my articles are not intended to be written as a veiled promotion for PCBmodE; it's not a tool I'd recommend people to use instead of the others. It works for me and what I do, but that's pretty niche.)I'd like to see a new generation of tools that focus on usability as much as they do on functionality, and that includes everything that you talk about. We will then get better results, waste less money on mistakes, and generally advance our profession.Saar *I RUN BOLDPORT* Drimer

author: stmdude
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 03:39:58 pm
content: Thing is, you still need to know _some_ theory to get anything but the most basic circuits working. At least in my experience.Do you wish to address that somehow (macro-level design?), or is it just the tools you'd like to change?To just get an MCU slightly faster than an 8-bit AVR going (and being stable), you need to know about decoupling.. Where to put the bulk capacitance, where to put the smaller decoupling caps. How should power-traces be routed?It's "slightly" more complex than connect-the-dots. And that's just getting the darned thing to power up..My first STM32 based boards were all notoriously difficult to JTAG. Took me a while to figure out that I was dealing with parasitic inductance, what parasitic inductance was, and lastly, what to do about it.

author: saardrimer
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 03:44:16 pm
content: That's a very important aspect of design that can be addressed through visualisation and an intelligent back-end. I don't think that it can be effectively 'patched' onto existing tools. I have a lot of ideas about how these things could look, but little time to implement them (yet). PCBmodE gives me a platform to experiment with some of these ideas, though.

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 04:20:31 pm
content: That cockpit centre console is a **REALLY** bad example, sure it has lots of buttons, so what, I bet that most everything you need often is on a single function switch. Seems like excellent user interface design to me, you just have to know who your users are (When you are designing for a user base that by definition is not scared of complexity, but does like to develop muscle memory for controls, one button per function (even at the cost of a huge number of buttons) is the only way to fly).The things I would be far more interested in are more in the line of much tighter coupling between things like thermal modelling and the PCB workflow, same for field solvers, mechanical FEM and such, Altium sort of tried with that whole mess of an FPGA thing, but it really did not hit the mark.Spotting that I have ended up with the electrolytic caps 60 degrees C above ambient before I build the prototype would be good, knowing as I do the layout that putting that 10nF decoupler there causes a really nasty power plane resonance at the fifth harmonic of my clock would be excellent, and being able to see in real time that if I put it over there instead I don't have a problem, that would be HUGE.Yes, I know, computationally **expensive**, but imagine being able to turn on a layer and see exactly where the currents would flow in the ground planes, and exactly where (and how extreme) the temperature rise was going to be, including consideration for the heatsinks, chassis and airflow. Or drawing a switched mode power circuit and having the system show you the contours of the leakage field.Being able to model more of the system, more accurately, earlier is the biggie for me, increasingly pure EE is a small part of the job, and no, I really don't give a shit about the user interface a lot of the time, I can type faster then I can mouse.I guess I am looking for ADS combined with a modern PCB package and Solidworks.73 Dan.

author: peter.mitchell
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 05:03:39 pm
content: nah EDA is fine until there is a better solution. thats not really going to happen any time soon so...

author: hammy
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 06:14:35 pm
content: Thank you for the articles.QuoteOr even the "full" package. That's an interesting point!Many people just like it "the way it is". They will never search for something new.It reminds me about the Arduino and the Arduino IDE. A lot of people said in the past it is a useless "toy" and running a boot loader on an Atmel and not programming it directly in Assembler is the wrong way .... and today? It was a great push for the Maker-community. And the Maker community was a big push for electronics in general.Now we can discover what will come behind the Arduino IDE somewhere in the future.Yes, maybe something new and fresh is needed. But maybe we need some new technology to get a new idea. An AI helping with the routing? A 3D Oculus Rift for the board layout?We have to get rid of these monitors and keyboards.Cheershammy

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 09, 2016, 09:57:00 pm
content: I read the page about PCBmode but from the description it sounds like MS paint with some symbols bolted on. I have developed a very similar piece of software over 25 years ago on a MSX-2 home computer. I guess history tends to repeat itself ad nauseum.Kicad is much further along but as Stmdude already noted the developers have not touched on implementing any real component management which integrates well with the logistics of having PCBs produced and keeping track of components. Orcad has been offering component management in their CIS option for over 15 years already so you can say the Kicad developers are rather slow in picking up the pace.

author: electrolust
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 10, 2016, 07:23:56 pm
content: My review: Far too much complaining (and a few wrong statements, like no one uses auto-routing). boo hoo hoo the established players are protecting their business. Stop complaining and start actually understanding the needs they are solving. Then keep in mind it's not good enough to solve the fun part of the problem, you have to solve all the grungy parts also.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2016, 07:44:45 pm
content: I am not sure I follow or agree with your points. You correctly fault the accuracy of library parts, and fault the footprints as not being optimized for your needs. I agree with both of those statements. But I don't want to start from scratch on every part I use. I like the ability to edit parts to my needs. That gives me the chance to to audit for correctness, and also to modify them for my situation without as much work as starting from scratch would require.Better interfaces with other types of software would be good. Spice, mechanical and thermal analysis. This would require some agreement both on the types of data that would be good to exchange between modules, and even more on format. A formidable job indeed. Just think of some of the things that might crop up. A very high power rf design often requires high voltages. Meaning that spacings to the case and other parts can be important. If that rf module will be used in an aerospace application pressure will vary widely as will vibration levels, which can change both the spacing and the spacing required. You have entered a world of 3D modeling, mechanical modeling, atmospheric physics and more.At least for now it seems that rather than trying to automate all of this it is better to plan on applying more skull sauce to the problems and then using simpler tools to refine the answers.

author: electrolust
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 10, 2016, 08:53:21 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on May 10, 2016, 07:44:45 pmYeah, I came back to say that OP is correct (IMHO of course) on the footprint "problem". It's not a problem of an adequate library size, it's a problem of footprint generation. Some tools make it easier than others.Then you have PCB Libraries' PCB Library Expert which is a really great tool. For the hobbyist/maker the price is too steep (even at $5/part for POD, vs $500 for the full package) but for the professional user $500 is an extremely good value. What's really interesting to me about Library Expert is that for the low cost of a copy of the standard, this kind of tool is implementable by anyone. I'm actually a bit surprised the open source community doesn't latch on to this.

author: PCB.Wiz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2016, 07:54:01 am
content: Quote from: saardrimer on May 09, 2016, 02:25:09 pmThanks for the chuckles - in spite of the attention seeking proclamations, EDA is far from dead.EDA stands for Electronic Design Automation, and that is never going away.Everyone likes to complain about their CAD tools, (which they nonetheless still use daily to create things), and armchair pundits like to make grand calls, like your"With all that they’ve learned so far, I think that a brave decision would be for KiCAD and gEDA to join resources, with the help of CERN funding (see below for other potential resources), and create a new tool from scratch to overtake Altium, Eagle, and the rest, at least in some areas. I’d love for that to happen."Hmm... Really ? 'Create a new tool from scratch' shows a significant lack of understanding of the fundamentals of design and design data.Testing and verifying tools often takes (far) longer than writing them, and expecting some newly created tool to overtake everyone, is fanciful.Good design tools take time, but what I can say about offerings like KiCad, is their rate of innovation is higher than the big players, and it is those incremental steps, that will make the difference.There is already some database sharing between gEDA and kiCad.If you want to look for a disruptive effect in EDA, look at Component Distributor Library effort - that may yet do, what Upverter was lamenting here :"But as I was writing that post, I noticed that it was quickly becoming a laundry list of all the ways traditional EDA makes it hard to disrupt them. All the walls they’ve built that keep startups out, and lock customers in. All the things preventing real innovation. All the little battles and wars we had to fight at Upverter just to get a seat at the table."If the Component Distributors have a database you can extract in almost any CAD format, that removes many of the walls mentioned.They of course, have real cashflows they can tap into, and the EDA players have little choice but to play along.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2016, 09:04:15 am
content: Now having read through your first article, and the next 3 followups about libraries,I am somewhat left with the opinion you yourself miss the complexity of what your suggesting,To set things clear, i am a KICAD user, and before that a PCB-Express one who got sick of the lock in,If you want an eda that is beginner friendly, take a look at pcb-express, just as an example of a minimalism UI, it does bugger all, but what it does, it does well, and editing components is very simple, so once you get used to it, you tend to have dug yourself into a hard to escape hole,People build up libraries over time because they tend to use the same parts, they are familiar with them, and if it needs software likely already have a code base to run it, if your like myself i add in the footprints and datasheets as i go. So next time around the part i like just works, its footprint matches, and all is right with the world, Now there is a limit on the flipside, without linking in something like a parametric search you would not want to amass too big of a library or it becomes hard to search, and even then many suppliers lie on there front page specs, (think current consumption under very specific conditions)for schematic symbols everyone has there own preference, and in the case of something like a micro controller or FPGA, where nearly any pin has 5 functions, sometimes you want to break it up, sometimes your grouping by pin number, sometimes by function, how do you handle power pins? etc, how to best show decoupling, etc? (e.g. you may space pins on a schematic to match the capacitor symbol)Next up design rule checking, yes differential pair DRC can be added, but in most cases that comes back to your schematic, this is where you define the connections, so unless you define in the schematic level what each output does (unlike the norm of just setting as inputs or passives so it doesn't bug you like so many do) it wont help, the rule checking can only enforce what it knows aboutIts the time taken to build up these "models" of components that is the biggest drain when it comes to more complex EDA, having to read through the datasheet to figure out that nothing works unless some obscure pin has a pullup, or what the output limits are on an op amp at 2.5V when the datasheet only covers 5V to make the specs look better, and that tiny footnote in the middle of the thing that to you at the time think is something that should be bolded on the first page, This is where the challenges of EDA lie, and this is primarily schematic work, from then on you tweak to fit as you layout, I'm not saying layout can not also be challenging, but most of that already has developed DRC, setup a few netclasses define keepout areas for sensitive signals, and follow good design practices such as not breaking planes under fast signals,Now the last parts come down to physics, this is a hard part of the learning curve, being able to visualize what happens to a signal at 0-10Ghz how noise gets into some nodes, how its radiated from others, truly a fine task for a field solver, but again this takes a lot of well defined starting conditions, such as output driver impedance's and such, to almost all EDA's its just a wire, possibly of controlled length and impedance, even calculating the heat of components takes a solid model of the components,

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 22, 2016, 10:55:20 am
content: Saar, despite your statement to the contrary I can't help but think that your articles and this postaremeant to promote PCBmodE. (Or at least explore its commercial potential as the basis for a next-gen solution.)I adore the projects you publish on BoldPort -- they are extremely creative, beautiful and original. But as you say yourself, they occupy a very small niche. The pure technical complexity and technical requirements of the circuits are actually rather trivial. Nevertheless, you seem to derive from your experience that a lot of the heavy lifting which established EDA solutions provide is not helpful, has caused bloated interfaces and hampered innovation etc..I would argue that, once you move into either (a) more complex circuits, critical HF requirements etc., or (b) routine development of straightforward PCBs, where just a quick and effective solution is required, the established EDA tools provide a lot of value. Large libraries, DRC, auto-routers ... are there for a reason. You may not need and value them in your projects, but a large group of users does. And if a next-gen product cannot provide these functions, I doubt it will be widely successful, even if it has a really cool user interface.This may be bad news for innovation in EDA software, and maybe bad news for your business plan, but I think it's just the reality of this domain.

author: chris_leyson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 24, 2016, 01:08:55 pm
content: Is EDA dead, I don't think so but there are areas that could be improved. I recently had to layout two PCBs stacked on top of each other, essentially a 3D design. Workflow goes something like, do draft PCB layout, generate 3D models for each PCB, use another CAD program to build the 3D model including cables and connectors, check clearances and iterate, and that was just to see if it all fitted into the available space. As for signal integrity and thermal modelling I had to second guess some of it as the cost of the additional EDA tools would have far outweighed any manufacturing profit. That was only two PCBs and I wonder how the hell you would design something like this...

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2016, 06:17:40 pm
content: Jepp, PCB layout should be closer coupled with mechanical design. But that doesn't have anything to do with the concept of EDA, all little complaints and problems that there are in current software can easily be fixed by replacing some features with better ones.And really, the article just sais: EDA software is dead, let's make better EDA software.