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Schematic Capture

Penguin Telecom's personnel have expert-level experience with getting symbols built and with schematic capture. Unlike traditional methods, our method avoids manual entry when possible and provides checks when not. Our flow includes:

  • Symbol generation by Perl-based manipulation of vendor data sheets. All symbols are reviewed to conform to engineering conventions, intelligent pin grouping and customer guidelines.
  • 100% checking of legacy or otherwise unverified symbols. Automated methods to find missing and duplicate pins in two or three minutes instead of an hour on parts with 500+ pins.
  • Use of hierarchy and Configuration Management tools to support more than one engineer working on a schematic.
  • Definition of schematic naming rules before starting schematic entry to reduce integration problems.
  • Reviewing all DRC warnings to find the real ones among the inevitable numerous false positives.
  • Holding targeted design reviews looking over the whole schematic in depth as well as avoiding missing subtle problems.

man with a schematic
While our personnel have used various tools, we especially excel at working with Cadence OrCAD CIS.

We know that our designs must work right the first time, and we produce schematics accordingly.


Some Schematic Capture Handoff Tips:
  1. Check for nets with more than about 8 connections. Often high connectivity on non-power nets represents an error when a slight mouse move shorts nets together
  2. Check for nets with similar but different names (e.g. RSTN and RST_N). If both nets have connections, a DRC typically won't find this problem.
  3. After the schematic is frozen, perform schematic differences to ensure what changed is only what was supposed to. Moving a net and shorting to another is a common source of errors.
  4. Make sure parts' values haven't been changed without updating the part number. This error will often result in incorrectly built boards.
Penguin Telecom has semi-automated methods for checking for these and related problems. We can also support outsourcing of your symbol generation process. Give us an e-mail.

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