busy busy busy

[jazzfish]

went to balticon over the weekend. much fun was had. many poptarts were eaten. i don't know that it was $200 worth of fun, but it was fun. hanging out with eeyore and dan is always cool... i don't get to see them enough.

discussed the possibility of getting a car, and will probably be taking out a loan from my parents to buy not-matt's '94 white mazda protege. *shrug* a car is a car. ideally i'll trade it in for a nice new one in three years or so.

new job started today. spent the day going through tutorials so i could have some idea of what it is i'm documenting. it's a program for simulating low-level electronics... quite cool. i've already found two bugs. :)

joe price is moved out, and i will never have to see him again. this makes me happier than almost anything else about the weekend.

Comments

electronics

[jazzfish]

um. i'm not really sure what exactly SPICE does... are you at all familiar with hardware design languages? they're a way of simulating your circuit in code. Verilog (the one we use most, although we've got support for a couple others) is entirely event-driven (ie, changes in signals occur at time #blah), so you have to come up with a timing diagram for the input signals.

basically, the product we've got (TestBencher Pro) consists of a timing diagrammer (you draw waveforms and it exports them into Verilog code, with delays and all that fun stuff) and a fairly powerful Verilog simulator. There's more to it, of course, but that's what I'm currently capable of using properly.

I think the timing diagrammer is capable of importing SPICE analog waveforms, but I haven't played with any such things yet.

Re: electronics

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Well, I've had to plug waveforms into SPICE, too.. you can check out the specs (and a downloadable Student Version) of PSpice 9.x here (http://www.orcad.com/Product/Simulation/PSpice/eval.asp), if you're interested.

Re: electronics

[jazzfish]

having looked a bit at pspice, i think that it does things at a much lower level than TestBencher was designed to... TB is mainly aimed at people making large-scale digital ICs, like microprocessors and such, so the descriptions are all written at a fairly high level.

Re: electronics

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I think spice can do that sort of thing, you'd just have to have all the lower componentry specs and build up..

Re: electronics

[jazzfish]

yeah... and TestBencher's perfectly capable of doing things as low-level as MOS switches, for the masochistic. :) if either of them _couldn't_ handle the opposite extreme at all, i'd be unimpressed.
of course, a spice product is way cheaper than a verilog simulator...