04 Mar

Weekly WIPs (work in progress) are shorter posts that describe projects or features that are still being worked on, as opposed to fuller posts looking at completed work. Most features take weeks to build, so these are smaller intermediate progress reports, but hopefully will still be interesting! W...

19 Feb

We always like to see when we can remove more lines of code than we add. The refactor mentioned in the blog post two weeks ago is finally done and merged, and in general refactoring is wrapping up. Hopefully new feature development (port arrays, then multipack devices) will start next week. A...

11 Feb

Since most of this week has been a refactoring slog on the HDL compiler, I'll instead talk about the engineering for the source-measure unit (SMU, HDL here) and multimeter (HDL here) example design boards that were built last year, but only started to get brought up. As a recap, a SMU is a combi...

04 Feb

One of the main difference between the board design tools we work on, and mainstream schematic tools is the much more expressive and rich data model. Instead of simply a netlist (components, pins, and connections between them) with very little additional data, we have the notion of blocks, ports, an...

28 Jan

Hi everyone! I'm a new postdoc with LEMUR, and I'll be working on modern tools for circuit board level electronics design. So that's a lot of words, let's unpack that. Modern board design tools (like KiCad) consist of schematic capture (drawing the schematic) followed by layout (placing components...