I am making an FPGA symbol, and it has multiple hundreds of pins. I have a spreadsheet from the manufacturer on the pin schematic label vs pin number, so I’m wondering what the easiest way to generate this symbol (is this something that can be imported into kicad?). Right now I’m just manually creating each pin, double clicking, typing label and pin number…Hoping there is a smarter way.
kipart lets you create symbols from a spreadsheet. There are also some preprocessors for taking FPGA pin tables from manufacturers. I also created some FPGA libraries using it.
All of this uses KiCad V5 symbol tables, so you’ll have to convert it.
Another (and very simple) technique is to use Symbol Editor / Edit / Pin Table. It has an editable spreadsheet overview of all pins in a symbol and it supports copy & paste. I made a lot of use of it in the thread below (which turned into a sort of half-tutorial for a multi-part symbol).
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Thanks all. I did try the Pin Table thing, but I couldn’t figure out how to spread the pins between different units. The pins would just appear in all units simultaneously for some reason, even though I had the “interchangeable” setting not selected.
Are you splitting it into power, prog, banks etc ? I have not tried this yet in Kicad, currently evaluating kicad to see if it can do all necessary. But I will have a go at it early if you have trouble
kipart looks useful, and also, user modifyable .
what FPGA?
rdb
OK I had a look at this.
The symbol pin table has UNIT field, so that should enable a unit aware import.
You might need to massage your import table to get unit allocation.
I was able to copy and paste in and out of excel just fine, modify unit allocations etc. Looks OK…
The PIN DELAY or PIN PACKAGE LENGTH field is missing from the table
I am getting that fixed . FPGA people need it here, not in 'package ’ LOL.
Also, for ease of import/export the location of the pins should not have the units mixed in with the numbers.