[SI-LIST] Re: Excel:an excellent tool for SI?
- From: Ray Anderson <reanderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:46:43 -0700
yu.yanfeng@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>All Gurus,
>
>Although Microsoft's Excel is applicable to some of SI's calculation, but
>It's not a pratical method for recursive calculations, because it's
>running time is very long. Ofcourse, I believe you can writes own codes
>for SI analysis. As we known, lot of engineers often write Mathlab codes
>to do thier analysis. But Do you consider whether the running speed is
>comaparable to those commercial tools which dedicated to SI? Writing codes
>and writing speedy codes are different things.
>
>Ultraeditor will replace 10,000,000 instances of a character in seconds.
>Notepad also can do same things but in hours, Wordpad in less hours,
>Winword in ten minutes.
>
>Yanfeng Yu
>
>
Whether a particular tool is practical or not depends on your
application and requirements.
In one application where I utilized the recursive calculation
capabilities of Excel to determine the voltage drop from the VRM to
every node on the PCB (in this case, 400 nodes, the result of 20x20
griding), the approx.10,000 recursive iterations it took to converge
required a bit less than 30 seconds. This was certainly acceptable to
me. Had I elected to use much more dense griddling and needed to
evaluate the voltage at say 10,000 nodes, then perhaps Excel might not
have been the right tool.
I agree that tools written in Matlab, Mathcad, Excel or other more or
less general purpose tools will usually exhibit performance much less
than special purpose tools that have been painstakingly optimized for
execution speed and efficiency. However, depending on circumstances, the
reduced efficiency and resulting longer run times might be just fine.
Some tasks require special purpose industrial strength tools to achieve
usable execution time and accuracy. Some tasks can be solved less
expensively at the expense of run time and/or accuracy with lesser
tools. It is just another case of using engineering judgment to do a
cost/performance trade off. When you elect to use a well developed
commercial tool you can gain at least several benefits: the expertise of
the tool developers, better accuracy, faster execution time, ease of
use. A Masserati and a '64 VW bug will both get you from point A to
point B, it's up to the user to determine which one is appropriate to
use for any particular trip.... Having more than 1 or 2 tools in your
toolbox gives one the flexibility to choose which one is best a
particular task at a particular time. Some tasks might requires one
particular tool while other tasks might be accomplished with one of
several available tools.
-Ray
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