Category Archives: Development

Circuit Tree in a new avatar

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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.

Embedded Part selection

Select Embedded elements and parts

select embedded processor and controllers

Select processors from the various options and search bar

Embedded board power up

Select various power up cases

Select Advanced circuit design options.

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.

Embedded hardware design Automation

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.

Intelligent component placement stage

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

Automated intelligent component placement by circuit Tree

Automated intelligent component placement by circuit Tree

Example of Automated intelligent component placement by circuit Tree

Send us your feedback comments at info@circuit-tree.com

Ever tried PCB Auto-placement?

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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

Schematic with decoupling capacitors

Component Placement on PCB

Component Placement on PCB1

Component Placement on PCB 2

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:

  1. Irregular Board outline
  2. Segregating high voltage circuits from low power circuits
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. It should understand the board outline, placement constraints, pcb layers.
  3. 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.

 

 

Real time BOM cost through Octopart

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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

  1. After you build design schematic the unit cost of the circuit tree selected part is fetched from octopart.
  2. 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.
  3. The ordering link is provided in the Bill of material excel sheet for you to order from.
  4. 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:

  1. Estimating the cost of his bill of material before starting with a design.
  2. Change part in circuit tree requirement editor in real time to reduce cost of the bill of material.
  3. By helping to reduce obsolescence issues and component procurement issues.
Figure1: Snapshot of Bill of material excel sheet generated from octopart

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.

How we check our designs?

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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.

Automated Part selection

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I was reading one of the silab blogs and came across an article that highlights some of the first hurdle electronics engineers come across from a design to design. Here is a snippet

“
Every electronic circuit need is different, however, and your solution to your problem will need specific circuits to solve that problem most efficiently and cost effectively.

So you have an idea for an electronic gadget…great! The trickiest step in the whole process is figuring out which electronic components, or parts, are needed to make up your circuits. This is not a step to be taken lightly. There are a billion ways to solve any problem and seemingly a billion parts out there to help you do it. First off, you have to find the components that make your solution possible, and then you will likely need to refine the design such that it is economically viable and power efficient. There are so many parts out there that it is hard for anyone to know all of the possible options. It takes a lot of research.

Often, electronics designers stick to what they know and have experience working on from past projects. This is with good reason; part specifications can be long, confusing, and sometimes inaccurate documents. Designing with something that you already know can vastly improve the chances of the prototypes working in short order. However, technology is always moving forward, and new parts can combine functions of other parts or improve cost and performance over past technologies. “

Well, these are problems that are easily solved with circuit tree.

Let us consider a case where you need to start a new processor design. You will have to start by going through a lot of documentation, errata’s, reference design, check-lists to go through the design and then understand how to start designing new hardware. Imagine the effort it takes to create this design/idea into a product. With circuit tree it is simple, pick the processor you want to choose, select from a variety of peripherals and components, choose power requirements and the intelligent engine creates a design that you can download to use or further customize.

Circuit tree now supports close to 1000 processors and a number of peripherals components. Generate instant schematic design and much-awaited PCB placement in a few minutes to bring your product closer to completion using the application.

Login to our server to check out the online EDA application. 

Short Introduction to Circuit tree

Circuit-tree is a circuit board PCB 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:

 

New PCB Design Capability

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Over several months we have added plenty of new features in the Online EDA tool circuit tree design to provide greater flexibility and customization for PCB Designs:;

Here are the prominent ones

  1. New library Components
  2. Part selection through requirement menu
  3. New peripherals
  4. Connectors, ADC,s DAC GPIO, LEDs, switches
  5. Ability to route any peripheral connection to a connector.
  6. Option to change processor in the requirement editor without affecting the existing peripheral requirement.
  7. Auto generated Fractured symbols with placement which avoids overlap.
  8. Altium and Eagle export options
  9. New power, clock and reset components added to support variety of designs.
  10. Updated validation engine

With the new design features the application can still create new PCB schematic designs in 60 seconds on the fly.

For the latest feature set check out the circuit tree design capability on http://circuit-tree.com

Team Circuit Tree

Online EDA component library and circuit combinations

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Someone asked me how many embedded/schematic PCB designs can you create with the application using an online EDA tool circuit tree?  I wanted to run through some numbers to state the combinations of circuits which can be generated.

Circuit Tree PCB tool Universe2

Let us list some of the options:

  1. Power supply input can be varied 5.25V to 22V in steps of whatever you like. We will take 1V steps which makes the power supply combination to be approximate no of 16
  2. The imx6 from the universe will produce 4374 combinations based on different interfaces that can be selected. Also, we will assume that only one interface is selected at a time.
  3. The total number of combinations of the circuit that can be generated for imx6 is 69984.
  4. We now have 4 additional processors whose number of circuit generation combinations will be less than imx6. The sum total of all 5 processors in the free tool will roughly increase beyond 100000 combinations.

What else is left out from our rough calculations:

  1. In imx6 , stm32f407 and atmel same70q functionality pins are multiplexed on different pins and have lots of options through which the pin selection can change.
  2. Components selected for discrete, clock, reset etc.

But why are we running numbers for you? Even though these numbers are huge for this small feature set, we are capable enough to generate each unique design reliably and take care of millions or more combinations that generate the full library options we provide.

To know the latest list of components and processors in our application and to generates schematic and PCB placement please login to the app site. 

Team Circuit Tree

Schematic Pages of interest you should visit when using Circuit tree application

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Introduction

Circuit tree is a online platform to generate a embedded design schematic and PCB placement using a easy to use editor with online library components. The  hardware compiler generates the design in  minutes and we have used the platform to generate thousands of designs and schematics. Whenever a schematic is generated for a given set of requirements, the application output always surprises and baffles us with something new. We get excited to see the generated output as we in no way control

  1. Component selection unless pre-selected from requirement page.
  2. Pin mux selection of the processor
  3. Power and its sequencing, clock, reset generation on the board
  4. Schematic Symbol generation
  5. Circuit connections on board
  6. Schematic Page creation.

This is the amount of variability the application has. This unconstrained output is however tested thoroughly before the schematic is displayed.

Continuing with the above thought we would like to share some of the most dynamic schematic connections generated so that you can understand that each created design is unique and the effort we have invested to ensure that the designs delivered to you are correct.

Use Cases

For this discussion we will be using the hardware compilers and its library components.

  1. When visiting stm32f407 look out how the usb connections are generated. Some of the requirements pictures are posted below in the figure. Also you can select ulpi and try exploring these pages too.

    USB requirement for stm32f407

    USB requirement for stm32f407

  2. When using imx6 controller select rgmii/rmii/mii interface in ethernet  or try pcie implementation. Look how the power sequencing takes places when rgmii phy with two power up voltage steps and imx6 with four power up ramp up steps ramp with with the  remaining circuit.
  3. When using the atmel same70 controller check how the usb connections vary based on the host or device requirement. Here is the final twister. Atmel microcontrollers requires that vddio supply should be above 3.0V when usb connections are being used. Use the atmel_same70q_example1 to commit requirement when
    1. Usb block is present
    2. Usb block is deleted from the requirement page

atmel_usb_conn

There are lot more interesting ways in which the circuit changes and we enjoy exploring these creations. Keep exploring and don’t forget to share your feedback about the application.

Need More

We have many more designs to prove that the circuit tree hardware compiler out there. Visit our github directory to know more about the automated design deliverables.