After Reducing Complexity: Returning to First Principles

[NatashaB]

This post is part of a series on the Importance of Ease-of-Use in Design Tools, which explores how re-thinking graphical capture and simulation can simplify and expedite the design process without sacrificing design capabilities.

Back in university, I had a digital electronics professor who often spoke of the ‘real world' applications of what we were learning, making the lectures both relevant and dynamic. In one particular lecture, he spoke of the use of schematic symbols in digital design and how increasingly, as we progressed in our education, schematics would become simpler by virtue of abstraction (upon abstraction) of the first principles we were learning at that time. This reduction in complexity (for example, the reduction of a complex circuit segment into a simplfied block) makes the schematic easier to read, while at the same time providing the designer with increased efficiency (and ability to innovate) by using high-level blocks.

Considering we were still in the stages of learning simple logic gate design and Karnaugh map minimization, this concept was understandably foreign to us. But as the course progressed, it became clear how these logic gates (which themselves can be considered abstractions) are abstracted away, for example, in the case of a digital adder, or a flip-flop. And we were able to see how, with this abstraction, comes increased power and flexibility through their simplification.

However, recognizing the value of working at this high-level, there may still be times when you want insight into a particular 'block' (or component) in your design. During simulation, for example, this might be to validate a SPICE model, or to simply verify parameters associated with a part. Of course, one option is to investigate the models and parameters associated with each individual component, but this is a tedious method that won't provide you with the holistic view of the SPICE 'code' being simulated.

Check out this video that will give you an idea of how you can get a holistic view of the underlying models and parameters associated with components in your schematic, but still design and innovate at that high-schematic level where it is most efficient. This way you get all the benefits of the abstraction, while still getting insight into those first principles (or in this case, the underlying netlist).