Circuit Tree is expanding day by day and in order to meet the complexity of vast requirements of embedded design we have redesigned the application. The new application is super easy to use, 10x faster than the previous version and efficient enough to generate simple or complex designs as needed.
Select Embedded elements and parts
Select processors from the various options and search bar
Select various power up cases
Select Advanced circuit design options.
Not only is the user interface changed we now support loads of features to provide quick design export options. You can now export Altium, Orcad and Eagle designs through circuit tree through menu or request dispatch over the registered email.
Various design export options as well options to email files when then generate
We now also support auto placement module where based on the dxf file intelligent board component placement is generated by circuit tree. The time required to generate simple placement to complex placement varies between 20 seconds to 7 minutes which is solely dependent on the complexity of the design. Compare this time to the manual placement of the components and you will find it useful. Circuit Tree is most useful tool to you where iterations at prototype stage need to be done to find the best form factor fit.
Pre Component Placement stage
Interested to see more of some interesting placement results. Additional details of this new feature is covered in a separate post.
Automated intelligent component placement by circuit Tree
Example of Automated intelligent component placement by circuit Tree
We do have a presence on Hackaday. Ever since we have posted about circuit tree as a circuit board design software our list of followers have been increasing as engineers do feel the need for a application which generates dynamic output and provides quality output. We would shortly be posting the projects that we tend to design using circuit tree. To follow us on hackaday click on the link below and become a active follower of circuit tree.
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
Here are few pictures which tell a story of how most of the circuit board design software’s doing a component placement job.
Schematic with decoupling capacitors
Component Placement on PCB1
Component Placement on PCB 2
The placement Picture shows how badly the CAD tools have badly messed up placement. With bad placement the objective of placement of capacitors closer to the device stands nullified. It is important that decoupling capacitors are placed closer to the power pins of the device in correct orientation with the shortest path possible with thick traces which can offer lower inductance path for the current flow.
From our experiments the auto placement results were poor when using under following conditions:
Irregular Board outline
Segregating high voltage circuits from low power circuits
Placement of high speed components around on the board to minimise noise and get good signal integrity on the signals.
Hence most of the designers prefer to perform the component placement of the board and then use or don’t use auto routers for quick layout.
Component placement should ideally have knowledge about:
What the circuit is all about? It should know what are components, power, clocks, reset, high speed circuits, smd/through hole footprints, constraints? Without this knowledge any placement engine output is just not complete.
It should understand the board outline, placement constraints, pcb layers.
It should understand netlist which most of the routers use for current optimal placement. All components are placed so that the nets/traces can have shortest distance between the device and receiver.
At circuit tree we care about this problem and are working to solve this problem. We believe that by offering intelligent part placement of our design solutions designers can use auto routers or manually route the board to significantly reduce the time it takes to complete the design.
This new feature is under development and showing promising results. Stay tuned to know when we start offering this exciting new feature.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
1. Save Design Time and Cost by quickly creating automatic schematic and pcb placement design with any of the 1000 processors or micro-controllers. We dont store any circuit board designs and all design are auto generated on the fly. Get the most intelligent component placement recommendation for the board.
2. Wide range of processors and micro-controller parts from Texas-intrument, Nvidia, St micro, Atmel or NXP.
3. Export your design creations to popular Cadence orcad , Mentor pads, Eagle and Altium for further customisations. Designs remain yours forever.
4. Quick Product cost estimate. Get real time cost from octopart and PCB house for the pcb cost.
bill of material excel sheet generated from octopart
5. Support for variety of board form factors such as Computer on Module, System on Module and Various form factor boards.
6. Large peripheral library along with growing list of components. Change components on the fly for the design and get a new design created in 60 seconds.
7. Assured quality. We go the extra mile to ensure that the designs generated are correct.
8. We value your Privacy. We don’t sell personal information to another site.
9. Growing Artificial Design Engine that grows with every user interaction and part addition in library.
10. Site has been created by engineers for engineers.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
Here is a introduction video to circuit tree:
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
We are happy to announce that we are using octopart to fetch cost of the bill of material in real time. The way it works is
After you build design schematic the unit cost of the circuit tree selected part is fetched from octopart.
The unit cost is found from the list of the vendor options in octopart to provide the lowest cost option to the user. The minimum order quantity which is closest to the order quantity is also selected.
The ordering link is provided in the Bill of material excel sheet for you to order from.
The total cost of the bill of material for each components is calculated for the quantity and provided in the excel sheet.
This is a great option as it helps your design by:
Estimating the cost of his bill of material before starting with a design.
Change part in circuit tree requirement editor in real time to reduce cost of the bill of material.
By helping to reduce obsolescence issues and component procurement issues.
Snapshot of Bill of material excel sheet generated from octopart
Some of the other example Bill of materials can be found at following link.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having intelligence of a hardware engineer to create PCB embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
Here is a introduction video to circuit tree:
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
Well, it is not surprising that the pain points presented in few years old studies are still valid today. Here is the summary of these:
Initial design stages (before prototype assembly and testing) typically require the most time and effort to gather all the necessary information.
There’s never enough time to properly utilize every relevant source.
Incomplete information is common across relevant sources.
Managing customer and vendor relations throughout the design process can be complicated, consuming even more time and resources.
At circuit tree we are trying to solve these pain points. Circuit-tree is completely automated and auto-generates for your embedded PCB circuit board designs
Build design schematic design in Eagle and Altium
Real-Time Bom cost with octopart.
Integrated footprints
The application is completely automated and one-stop for all the information you may need. It has been designed to provide a reliable design and helps you jump start your embedded circuit board design quickly.
Let us know what do think about our application tool capability in solving these problems.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit-tree is an online EDA application having the intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded PCB circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
A short introduction to Circuit Tree:
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
Here is a guide for a new user as well as provide details to a user about the design flow.
Let us start with a example wherein you select a design suggested in our post. The post contains a am3352 processor from texas instrument and is fairly popular among engineers. In the example we create create design schematic for a olimex board.
To start with, login to the site Circuit tree tool and you will enter at the requirement editor section.
A clear design requirements editor will have only Board Entry Power block on the editor area similar to shown in the figure below
On the left side from the library menu look for the Texas instrument Processor AM3352 then drag and drop the block to the editor area. Once block will be placed a Board Entry Power menu will be popped out similar to one shown in the screenshot. Select the connector, input voltage range and type of the power and press Save changes button.
Once the processor is on editor area user can continue to place other peripheral devices according to their requirements, Click the expand icon of the TI AM3352 processor and design option windows will appear. Select the appropriate options and click save changes button to go back to the editor.
From the library menu look for the Ethernet library and place the block to the editor. Once the block is placed in editor area Ethernet Library menu will be opened. Select the library functions from the drop down list that includes all Ethernet supported modes. For the demonstration we are picking parts and modes similar to the Olimex AM3352 SOM board. Click the Get Parts button and wait for the application to choose best suited part. If the selected part is not you are looking for the click the expand button on ‘Select other Matching Parts’ section.
A window will be popped up with all other available parts of the family. Select the suitable part and click Save changes button. There are other device specific options available for user to choose from, click the button indicated by arrow on selected part and application will take you to the available design options.
Select the appropriate options and press Save changes button on both opened windows and this will take you back to the editor area with all selected options saved in engine’s database.
To copy the olimex SOM board design, repeat all previous steps to add another Ethernet PHY to the editor area. Once done adding Ethernet PHYs to the board look for the DDR3/L Memory Library from the library menu. Select the library function options and click Get Parts button to let the application select respective part then click Save changes button to go back to the editor area.
To add NAND memory to your board look for the Parallel Memory Library and place the block to the editor area. In Library Functions drop down menu select the NAND option and click Get Parts button. If the selected part is right click save changes button or click button represented by arrow in Select other Matching Parts.
Look for the 8GB NAND memory and then click the radio button to select the part and then click save changes button on both windows to go back to the editor area.
To add SD card support to your design place the SD Library to your design and choose from the SDHC connector, Micro SD Connector and emmc memory. Click the Get Parts and once application finished loading part click save changes button to go back to the editor area.
For debugging, CT also support debug connectors to be placed on the board. Place the JTAG library on the editor and select ARM 2X10 Connector or other from the library function options. Click get parts button and then click save changes button to finish placing JTAG connector and to transfer the control to the main editor.
Circuit tree also includes CAN transceivers for industrial and automotive designs. Place the CAN library from the library menu and click the Get parts button on library menu. To change the selected part click the expand button on the Select Other Matching Parts section.
As our guide is based on the Olimex SOM board and to follow the same parts, look for the SN65HVD230D CAN transceiver check the radio button and click to save changes button to go back to the CAN library window. Click the expand button in selected part section to explore more device specific options. Once device specific options are selected click save changes button to complete the CAN part selection.
Next peripheral to add to the design is USB, application supports USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and ULPI transceivers. To add USB to the design look for the USB Library and place to the editor area, select the library functions and click Get Parts button to let the application select the suitable part. Once the part is selected click the save changes button to finish the wizard. Repeat the steps for OTG and HOST peripheral connectors.
Circuit tree also allow user to route connector to any interfaces to connector peripherals externally to the board. To add connector to the design, look for the connector block in components library. Once the connector is added to the editor a window will be popped out for connector options. Select the proper sizing of the connector and number convention and click save changes button. Note the connector designator that will be used in next step.
Next add UART block to the editor area, now here is a new thing instead of looking for parts click the expand icon under ‘Route Interface to Connector’ section and the connector configuration window will be popped up. Select rout the interface option and connector designator from the previous step. Once done click save changes button to finish routing connector to the interface.
Same can be done with SPI and I2C interfaces, to add connector to SPI interface place Serial Memory Library block from the library menu select SPI and rest of the process is same. For I2C interface, in Serial Memory Library select I2C from the library functions drop down menu and repeat the same process.
The menu’s are easy to use and the interface has been created for quick turnaround of the design.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit-tree is a circuit board design software application having the intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
Here is an introduction video to circuit tree:
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
For solving any problem you need wonderful teamwork to attempt and create a perfect circuit board design software application. We value the quality of circuit board designs produced as we want to be judged based on that and nothing else. The challenge here is that every design created by circuit tree is unique. It is manually next to impossible to even check all the drawings. We just cannot.
We had anticipated this problem early on and planned multi tier check. Here they are
During model creation. All our components are added in our hardware proprietary models. These models have number of fields which are scraped from the datasheets and other design information. These models are verified and reverified to ensure that the information presented matches the information available.
Scripts. We use a lot of scripts to test the models for correctness. These scripts are updated whenever we find issues in the models.
Model in action. The models are used with a tested processor to check different functional conditions along with its circuit board circuit options.
Generated design validation. We again use a lot of scripts to different possible conditions. The code has check to check various conditions. Like our circuit board design software application application the test infrastructure is also maturing.
Experienced Hardware designer application review. Here we have a senior engineer involved whose main work is run the application and report the issues. Other than the design he also looks for issues in BOM, exported designs. Most of the issues are web-based which are passed back to the development team for rectification.
Thank you for your time.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit tree is a circuit board design software application having the intelligence of a hardware engineer to create PCB embedded circuit board designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
Here is an introduction video to circuit tree:
To start building your circuit board design now click on Access Tool.
We start to create a board design similar to TMDXEVM8148 board which is distributed by Texas Instruments. Some of the feature set of the board are listed below:
Dual 32bit DDR3 controller of TMS320DM8148 interfaced to a DDR3 Memory of 1GB
256MB NAND Flash Memory placed in 48 pin TSOP socket
256-Kb I2C Serial EEPROM to store the board ID information
32Mb SPI Flash provided on the EVM for optional booting
On Board Audio Codec AIC31066 “Ultra low power microcontroller MSP430 used for power monitoring using the current shunt & power monitor devices INA220
Supports analog video output such as, Composite video and S-video
1080p HDMI Video Output with ESD Protection
On board Audio Input (Line in and Mic) and Audio Output (Line Out and Headphone)
4-bit SD/MMC interface
Two Gigabit Ethernet port with onboard Ethernet PHY’s using RGMII ports
Dedicated UART port for Debug and MSP430
IR Receiver interface
JTAG for DM814x and MSP430
PCIeX1 lane support on PCIe-x4 connector
SATA 3Gbps direct Interface to HDD with onboard HDD power connector
DC supply 12V +/- 5%, 5A Max through Power adapter
On-Board Clocks for DM814x and for SATA/PCIe
Reset and power on/off switches for controlling the DM814x EVM
Boot switches for various boot configuration selection
Expansion IO Boards
512 MBit NOR Flash memory
3 axis smart digital output accelerometer
256-Kb I2C CMOS Serial EEPROM to store the board ID information
WLAN Daughter card provides IEEE802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth v3, including Bluetooth low energy (BLE) connectivity
SPDIF interface through TOSLINK & RCA jack Analog SD IN (S-Video & composite video) digitized using TVP5147M1 decoder
Analog HD IN (RGB & VGA) using triple high-performance analog-to-digital (A/D) converter TVP7002
Digital HD Video capture using DVI Receiver (SiI1161)
LCD connector for interfacing LCD adapter board Serial camera interface through CSI
12- Bit parallel camera interface
UART
Dual DCAN Bus interface
Circuit-tree has been able to take in these complex board requirements and has been able to generate a complete schematic.
Thanks for reading the post.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit-tree is an online EDA application having the intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded hardware designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
Here is another capability test we wanted to conduct with the latest set of features. These tests help us check the limits to which we can test our engine check in addition to check the usability of the application.
We choose a stm32f407 reference design from STMicroelectronics for comparison as it is a complex board and our guess is that it has taken several week to design the board.
We quickly pulled in the design which we have created in our example library and selected components such as usb3317 from the usb library as our ulpi transceiver. We let circuit tree design remaining combinations for us. This is the what our design looked like in requirement editor.
Circuit tree quickly generated the design for us by doing all the complex tasks behind the scenes.
Let us compare the results. The table below shows what circuit tree could achieve in comparison with the board and what it could not.
Comparison chart of features supported by the two boards
I am glad to report following findings: 1. Circuit tree did not connect two peripherals in parallel. For instance MicroSD connector and RS232 connectors. It also did not do create connections where audio port is shares pin with MicroSd port ON ST boards. Here are the list of pins allocated by the circuit tree versus the application board. 2. Some of the features we don’t support at the moment but we have capability to do so and extending our capability every day. 3. Finding processor pins for the peripherals, component selection for peripherals, power clock reset, optimisation, decision circuit configuration , schematic generation and check is all done in a shortest span of time. We like to keep things simple and easily understandable for our users which is reflected in our final output. 4. The application schematic generated can still be downloaded in a popular PCB design tool and used for further customisation. 5. The best part is that I can quickly go back to the requirement editor and change a). The ethernet transceiver to Microchip lan8710 and b). The CAN transceiver to TI SN65HVD230D and c). Change zigbee module to Zigbee Internation XB24C module. d). change input voltage to 9V.
The design file [containing Eagle and Altium] Schematic and the bill of material is ready by the time i write this.
TIP: You could also go back to the board requirement menu ,delete the processor and add any other processor and still generate the design.
Short Introduction to Circuit tree
Circuit Tree is an online EDA application having the intelligence of a hardware engineer to create embedded hardware designs. It features more than 1000+ processors and controllers along with extended hardware peripheral library.
