Re: gEDA-user: uEDA .. was .. Re: Heavy Symbols and such

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 7, 2007, at 3:45 AM, Dan McMahill wrote:

> John Doty wrote:
>> On Dec 6, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Steve Meier wrote:
>>
>>> As long as its semantics is well enough deffined that I can write a
>>> macro to read and write its file formats then why not?
>>
>> It might be nice, but who knows what it is, and how to reasonably map
>> it onto our problem? Al's always selling Verilog. But I went and
>> bought the book he recommended on Verilog-AMS, and it was mostly more
>> sales pitch.
>>
>> I AM REALLY TIRED OF THE VERILOG SALES PITCH.
>>
>> Is there any *substance* here beyond the digital HDL?
>>
>> Al, *show* us something *real*. I don't necessarily mean you need to
>> write something: a pointer to something would be just fine (as long
>> as it's not just more pitch). But the more you push what seems to be
>> vapor, the more I'm going to ignore it. And I suspect I'm not the
>> only one...
>
> I use verilog-A quite a bit and it is a huge benefit to me in real  
> world
> (not just CAD vendor white paper) applications.  Here is a simple
> example.  You can generate a much more complex stimulus to drive a
> circuit under test with.  Yes you could use <insert external program
> name here> to generate piecewise linear source, but it really can be
> much more convenient to have it integrated with the simulator.  Also,
> suppose the source needs to react to some signal in the test  
> schematic.
>   PWL sources don't do that.  Verilog-A does.  Before I had access to
> AMS, I had several cases where Verilog-AMS had exactly the missing
> feature I needed to greatly simplify and expand some simulation  
> coverage.
>
> I think a big part of the issue here is this:
>
> - there are no verilog-AMS implementations which are freely  
> available or
> even priced in the few thousand dollar range.
>
> - there are no verilog-A implementations which are freely available.
> I'm not sure if you can get one for a few thousand or not.

But even worse for the purpose of understanding its possible use in  
gEDA, it seems impossible to find real information and practical  
examples. There's a lot of hype. but where is the *substance*?

>
> The end result is unless you're spending 10's of thousands on CAD
> software, you don't have access to these tools and as such people are
> not using them for hobby projects.

It's not just hobby projects. I'm a professional physicist, and the  
things I design are state of the art scientific instruments, but I'm  
not a full time circuit designer and I don't have the EDA tool budget  
that a full time designer would have. gEDA has been extremely  
valuable to me.

>   Since the projects using those tools
> are all proprietary, there is little opportunity for users here to  
> give
> much more information beyond "these tools are worthwhile".  No  
> concrete
> examples.  Besides, its not like most people here could run a concrete
> example anyway because of the lack of an implementation that is  
> even in
> the "pretty darn expensive but I want one at home anyway" price range.
>
> I could spend time an put together a non-proprietary example, but it
> would be a fair amount of effort because to fully appreciate the
> capability you need a problem of some complexity.  And then at the end
> of the day I'd have an example that can't be run until gnucap has
> verilog-A or verilog-AMS.  I for one am thrilled at how much Al is
> working towards having that capability.

If it's anything like as good as Al claims it will be, I will be  
happy to use it. But I have little confidence, given the present low  
signal to noise ratio.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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