Connecting Instruments To Your EDA ToolsSponsored by: NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS

May 26, 2005
After many lengthy Spice simulations and some design tweaking, you're finally comfortable enough with your pc-board (PCB) design to build a prototype. Once it's built, you'll want to put the prototype on the lab bench and get it up and running. You'll typ

After many lengthy Spice simulations and some design tweaking, you're finally comfortable enough with your pc-board (PCB) design to build a prototype. Once it's built, you'll want to put the prototype on the lab bench and get it up and running. You'll typically use standalone or modular test instrumentation to take some measurements of operating characteristics to compare them to the simulation results. And this is where things can get very interesting.

Very often, those measurements and simulations don't correlate very well. Somewhere in the transition from a software-centric design environment to a hardware-centric, physical-measurement-based design environment, things can go awry. Spice models, detailed as they might be, reflect only an idealized design environment and often fail to account for realworld effects on circuit operation. This can cause a lengthy and very expensive iterative cycle of prototyping that continues until those unexpected real-world effects are accounted for.

Improving the process of circuit simulation is, to some extent, a matter of blurring the lines between design, characterization, and validation by improving the connectivity between design and measurement tools. Closing the design-tovalidation loop makes for less iteration by identifying discrepancies between your design (as simulated) and the prototype.

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About the Author

David Maliniak | MWRF Executive Editor

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.

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