The facilitation of insight for analog design

The design of an electronic circuit or system-and, indeed, of many other artifacts and schemes-depends heavily upon the expertise, knowledge, and innate skill of the human designer. Unfortunately, many computer based tools fail to fully exploit such human qualities. Thus, while a massive amount of research has been carried out in the essentially technical aspects of circuit design, very little effort has been directed to the support of essentially human aspects of design, such as the development of insight through exploration. This paper describes a new concept, embodied for illustration in a tool called the Influence Explorer, which facilitates human visualization of the relations existing between the parameters and performances of a circuit, thereby enhancing the designer's acquisition of insight into those relations and, as a consequence, the quality of a final design. The new tool is not intended to replace existing computer-aided design tools, but rather to complement them by exploiting a human activity largely unsupported at present.