I have been spending the evening hidding back here in my office puzzling over eda data structure terminology for capturing the complexity of devices. This is actually very cowerdly of me as I am avoiding my wife's quilting bee which has taken over the rest of the house.
In trying to scope the data structure issue of describing components I am pondering. 1) The project type. (board design, asic design, fpga design etc.) Would the project type matter? Would different drc rules be applied? I think so, comments please. (this might be a good time to link in a project requirements document) 2) The situation where the designer has an idea that they need a component of some type for example a JFET and but they haven't decided which one. Here I suspect it would make sense to drop into the schematic a generic JFET symbol with generic pins (gate, drain, source). I think adding performance requirments would also support device selection later. Is "generic device" an acceptable term for this state? 3) If the project is a circuitboard then before then before the netlist can be generated at least the package has to be selected (passive) and often the device (active). A device complete with package and required values, manufacturor is called a "component"? If the project is a circuit either asic or fpga then generic types are probably going to be translated into standard logic cells? 4) Before a board can be released to manufacturing all components and values must be selected. But at this time a component must have a manufacturor and a specific manufacturor part number. But a component could have multiple manufacturors. Is "bom_entry" a good term for this condition where a needed device could be a number of different components all of them similar (same package, same performance) but having different manufacturor part numbers and possibly different manufacturors? Thanks, Steve Meier _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user