Wednesday, January 14, 2015

It's So Hard to Make a Good IC Design Schematic Capture Tool :)

5spice has a mention on MIT.

But... though it's way better than pspice and kicad (holistic grading), it still has a ways to go.

No undo/redo :) So basic, so hard to do :)
Place a component in such a way that one of its terminals is on an existing wire. Now drag the component. Not connected :(

But, it's a joy to have click and drag. Why is that so hard for LTspice to implement? Also, click and select exists!

Net highlighting is broken - kind of all-or-nothing is what you get - not good enough.

Still, phenomenal job by a one-man team.

Apart from that - what's missing? The usual suspects :) :

A way to do custom bindkeys.
A command-interpreter window where you can basically see every interaction you have with the software captured as a command, so you can easily bunch up some commands and do your own macros.
A library browser that lets you access components in a more user-friendly way - you want to see names and views, etc..
A better wire-drawing experience. He's got some of it - but it ain't no Cadence :)
Stretching is pretty crappy - ain't no Cadence :)

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