5196106067

DESIGN

The _A Complete Service awailable from any CAD bureau in Australia.

PROFESSIONAL P.C.B.s

Ihis —

•    Printed Circuit Design

•    Photoplotting PC CAD output

•    Technical Support

f thls —

•    Software for PCB Design O Racal-Redac REDCAD O Protel-PCB

•    Standard Compatible Hardware O NEC APC IV

O COMPAG Deskpro 386

•    Penplotters

•    Photoplotters

at your sernice 15 hrs. a day

R.C.S. Design Pty. Ltd.

728 Heidelberg Road,

I Alphington, Victoria 3078 _)    (03) 49 6404 (03) 49 6792

Fax. [phone] (Att. R.C.S.)

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A sample ol some of the library icons

AutoCAD package. (Courtesy Edutech

+

cngineer to decide whether it’s a satis-factory solution in terms of good elec-tronics design. So even when a complete PCB pattcm has been achieved,*it can still repuire further component jug-gling and re-runs to achieve a design which secms capablc of the right elec-tronic performance. Romę wasri’t built in a day!    ^%    '*.

As well as producing the PCB pat-tern, a CAD package can often also produce a bill of materials for the com-ponents repuired, as noted earlier. It may al.so be able to produce matching patterns for the PCB solder ręsist masks, and for the component Identification pattern to be silk-screcned on the top óf the resulting PCBs. In some cascs it can even be arranged to pro-ducc a “program” to guide a numcncal-ly-controllcd drilling machinę, in drilling the holes for the resulting PC boards.

In short, the morę elaborate CAD packages can take your Circuit sche-matic, and can at the vcry least help you greatly in designing virtually all aspects of the necessary PC board, jf not perform a lot of this design for you.

The latcst CAD packages and ver-sions of existing packages are now add-ing a further string to their bow: the ability to take the net lisf which dc-seribes your Circuit, and simulate its avalfable for electronic work using the

Productions) •    , *

%

electronic operation using the informa-. tion stored in its database on the bcha-viour of ęach component used, and the . way theyTe connected. *

When you run one of thesc simula-tion modules, it can show you the Circuit vo!tages and currcnts and hów fhese will alter with input signals and other changes. You can can look at Circuit waveforms and logie lcvcls, just as if you’d built up a prototype of the Circuit, and were checking its operation with a scopc or a logie analyser.

Up until recently this kind of simula-tion was only availablc on very cxpcn-sive mainframe and large minicomputer CAD systems, because it involves a lot of numbcr-crunching. However simula-tion packages are now bccoming avail-able for PC^:based CAD systems, and at surprisingly rcasonable cost.

Both digital and analog simulation packages are available. For example the newly released package OrCAD/VST providcs simulation of digital circuits produced using the same company’s well-known OrCAD/SDT schematic design tool, while the package PSpice pro-vides simulation of analog Circuit operation. The latter package is a PC implę-meniation of the famous SPICE analog Circuit simulation program developed originally at the University of California

ELECTRONICS Australia. September 1987