DRCY AI Best Practices

Best Practices When Working with DRCY

DRCY is designed to work methodically through a review, similar to an engineer on your team. As the quality of a schematic improves, the ability of an engineer to provide in-depth review also improves. This is commonly referred to as “Good Schematic Hygiene”, and it helps DRCY in the same ways that it helps an engineer. The goal of DRCY is not to replace your team, or turn electronics development into a sterile, automated process; the goal of DRCY is to help your team reduce errors, increase efficiency, and follow a healthier and more reliable process. DRCY’s comments will help immensely, but the ways you interact with AllSpice will drive even more value into your organization and hopefully DRCY can help reinforce those good behaviors that every engineer applauds. Below are some best practices for your team that will also help DRCY.

Complete designs

Tips: to get the most value out of a design review make sure to address known issues or incomplete circuits before calling on DRCY.
Impacts: DRCY expects a design to be ‘complete’ with the assumption that the designer does not know of any issues or missing circuitry, so when there are high level functional flaws DRCY is likely to focus the review on these issues.
Cautions: incomplete designs with major issues are likely to extend the review time and in the case these issues are broadly impactful, DRCY may not perform the a satisfactorily deep review elsewhere due to lacking evidence.

Schematic notes

Tips: add clear and concise notes with net and/or component references; recommended notes include component operating modes, currents and voltages, register configurations, operating frequencies, and off-schematic interfaces or conditions.
Example of a useful note that could be improved by directly referencing the component designator or net name (especially when there are multiple similar nets on a page):
Impacts: draws DRCY’s attention, provides functional context, increases the depth and relevancy of comments.
Cautions: notes will change what DRCY focus’s on for better or worse, keep notes concise and intentional, ensure they are accurate and aligned with your review goals; place correlated note data in the a single text string to avoid confusion about mapping co-located strings such as in pseudo tables or arrays; embedded images will not be analyzed.

Net names

Tips: Use simple but meaningful net names to convey signal parameters and/or purpose.
Example of good GPIO net naming, where nets that have a defined purpose are given clear names, while general purpose nets align with pin names.

Impacts: DRCY attempts to align net names with connections and operation and will generate comments when there are conflicts, even if the circuit is deemed functional.
Cautions: Inaccurate net names or conflicting net/pin connections are highly likely to generate a false positive comments; multi-purpose or complex net name schemes may not be reliably understood or analyzed, could lead to false positives or be ineffective at drawing DRCYs attention.

Component location

Tips: Keep relevant components such as pull-ups, set resistors, voltage references, or filtering circuitry in clusters on the same page.
Example of a good component cluster, where the majority of each pin’s purpose and requirements are addressed in the same cluster.

Impacts: DRCY groups components that are related and analyzes groups one by one - keeping related components on the same page helps DRCY create the best groups for analysis.
Caution: DRCY is improving cross-page analysis, but currently if critical components are off-page it is like DRCY will not focus on their impact across pages - schematic notes for critical off-page connections can help mitigate this.