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Re: gEDA-user: Symbol creation



On Sunday, December 14, 2003, at 02:15 PM, Stuart Brorson wrote:

If your parts are analog parts, or have analog and digital sections
(e.g. an A/D), my opinion is that the pwr/gnd connections should be
brought out on pins explicitly.   For power nets this is good practice
because then you can explicitly attach the power decoupling/bypass
networks to the pin.  For GND, this is good practice because you often
want to attach analog GND pins to an analog GND plane, whereas digital
GND pins often go to a separate digital GND plane.
I have to agree with Stuart. I used to prefer the net attribute method of hiding the power/ground information ("signal pins" in PADS PowerLogic), but after dealing with some mixed-voltage systems, IMHO it causes more trouble than it is worth.

If you want to keep the power/ground pins separate, you could draw the symbol in at least two parts, keeping the power and ground pins in one sub-symbol. You could then consolidate all of the power/ground connections and decoupling caps on one sheet, which keeps that information out of the way of the other interconnections. With this method, you can use different sizes of decoupling caps for different chips (connecting them to the sub-symbols on the separate power/ground sheet), and know exactly which chip requires which decoupling cap at layout time.

I have seen this method in use on several DSP eval board schematics, and it seems cleaner than interspersing the power and ground pins with signal pins.

--
Charles Lepple
clepple@ghz.cc