SPICE tools (Simulation Program for Integrated Circuit Engineering) such as LTSpice are designed to provide stable circuit simulations in order to validate designs prior to physical prototyping. This is incredibly useful when working with new analog designs as it enables you to quickly validate different circuits without having to spin a prototype or procure the […]
Month: July 2016
Mentor PADS: Designer Layout Modeless Commands
Mentor PADs features a variety of “modeless” commands that all you to change settings on the fly using quick keystrokes instead of poking around through the GUI menus. This post describes some of the available commands using the Layout package. To activate the commands you simply start typing when the software has focus. After the […]
Markdown: Cheat sheet
Markdown was designed as a lightweight markup language that could be quickly converted to other formats (such as HTML). The advantage is that it’s simpler and quicker to get basic information formatted and shared. Below I’ve compiled a short cheat sheet. Headers # H1 ## H2 ##### H5 Horizontal Rule Three or more hyphens, asterisks, […]
Adding Visual Studio Code to Your Context Menu
I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code but the one thing that I found was missing when switching from Sublime Text is the inability to open any file with it by using the context menu. Adding this functionality can be done with a simply registry tweak. Open the registry by pressing [WIN]+[R} and […]
Getting Xilinx ISE to Work on Windows 10
Unfortunately, Xilinx ISE does not officially support Windows 8 or newer and likely will not due to the shift from ISE to Vivado. Fortunately enough, there’s an easy fix to keep you up and running. The below steps were performed on Windows 10 x64. Open the following directory: C:\Xilinx\14.7\ISE_DS\ISE\lib\nt64 Find and rename libPortability.dll to libPortability.dll.bak […]