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Unfortunately if you want some features you have to go proprietary, e.g. signal integrity, thermals etc. It would be a fun project for some enterprising studen
by mhh__ 6y ago
Unfortunately if you want some features you have to go proprietary, e.g. signal integrity, thermals etc.
It would be a fun project for some enterprising student's thesis project (open source signal integrity, for kicad, that is). I'm curious what CERN use considering they use KiCAD
Altium probably has the best UX of the EDAs on the market right now, but it's all stuck in one glorious thread! The just search and drag flow for symbols is a huge boon
- jleahy 6y agoYou can survive without, just. For thermals you can create an equivalent electrical circuit and use SPICE. For power integrity you can mostly make do by cascading s-parameters and there is an Excel sheet floating around somewhere that'll give you s-parameters for a rectangular plane with two arbitrary connections. High-speed serial signal integrity is a bit harder, I will admit.
- elcritch 6y agoCan you elaborate on the cascading s-parameters bit?
- jleahy 6y agoSure, let’s say you have an s-parameter network that represents a PCB. You have 10 ports, 1 for the DC-DC converter, one for an ASIC and 8 for capacitors. You take s-parameter models of the capacitors from the vendor (Murata, AVX, etc) and tie off the ports of the main network to make a 2-parameter network. With a 2-parameter network you can now calculate the equivalence impedance (which is a function of frequency) and plot it or do a spice simulation with ngspice. scikit-rf is one tool that can load touchstone files and perform these kinds of transformations.
- elcritch 6y agoThanks! Seems like something that could be added to KiCad, well, if I could decipher the API.
- bsder 6y ago> Altium probably has the best UX of the EDAs on the market right now It may be best, but I'm not sure I would call it good. Right now I have been splitting my PCB designs between KiCAD and Altium. Once KiCAD 6 releases, I'll probably go all in on KiCAD. I simply am tired of the fact that my EDA tooling always sucks in so many ways. And now EDA vendors are all incentivized to "monetize" me instead of fixing their damn bugs. At least with KiCAD, I can fix the suckage or pay someone to fix the suckage.
- mhh__ 6y agoMake no mistake, Altium is still shit. Also, Altium if you're reading this, send me emails about why I should use the software rather than just a price tag and begging.