Back in my early days of design, we would work out designs on paper, put them to a schematic, and head for the cad department. As time grew a certain newly appointed project engineer gave the whole design team a speech. “Simulate, simulate, simulate” he said, as he emphasized the importance of simulating ones design prior to production release.

This was very good advice and I followed it as I learned the sim tools of Mentor logic. From this project managers advice I have become a disciple of simulation in the practice of engineering.

With that said, I find far too many now rely on sim tools as a design tool rather than a check tool of ones design. Instead of working out a problem, many rely on the simulation tool to do the work for them. This is not what the sim tool is for. You must first design your circuit, have a reasonable understanding of how it should work, once the design is made, then a simulation should be run. Do not use the sim tool...

While the advent of devices like the AVR and PIC microcontrollers have enabled the hobbyist to implement their vision into a real world working piece of hardware, it has also become a substitute for a solid knowledge of digital circuits and design by some.

The digital circuit hobby designer has become a black box, embedded code designer, and may lack the rudimentary knowledge of digital hardware design. Don’t get me wrong; there are many PIC and AVR users that do have a good digital design foundation, but use the embedded approach out of convenience. Often however; a budding hobbyist learns the ways of the black box art without much knowledge of digital design. The latter situation becomes apparent when a person inquires about building a divide by N circuit, and the response is often, “Use a PIC”. To me this seems silly when a simple logic device would suffice.
If a hardware engineer were to suggest such a solution for a production unit, he/she would be thrown...