The Netlist is a Wall

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Back in the days of old, electronics were mostly the product of a single mind.

As in any maturing industry, the people involved gradually specialized. The scarce time of engineers could not justifiably be spent drafting straight lines in the peculiar Sudoku we call PCB layout.

Enter the draftsmen¹. They would take the engineer’s logical model (what we call the schematic) and turn it into physical reality, manually drawing the copper traces that connected the circuit together.

Fast-forward to the age of the computer, and things stayed mostly the same. For a while, everyone expected machines to take over the job of laying out boards, although their performance was always questionable.

As we tried to push further into the megahertz, edge rates and density increased, and what had been a chore became an art. This period of our industry gave rise to many of our “rules of thumb” (some more useful than others) which became our folklore of sorts.

The new world of high-speed electronics was much more complex, and understanding it required significant study. Today, the modal layout designer has a BSc, with a significant part of the industry holding MScs or PhDs.

Most complex designs today are laid out by the same engineer who created the schematic, an inevitable consequence of Conway’s law. The changes, the tradeoffs, the sheer volume of information that needs to cross between the two sides of the PCB design are just too much for the limited bandwidth of human communication.

But the divide remains with us in our software and workflows, like a scar from the past, still visible in our day-to-day work. Even modern software such as KiCad uses two separate binaries for schematic capture and PCB layout.

What would ECAD look like without that rift? Is that gap even worth closing? and if it is, how do you even start?

I have more questions than answers, but I’m fairly sure there is a better way to build PCBs. Why, for example, can’t we have persistent relationships like those found on mechanical CAD? Why is online DRC still so slow on modern computers?

I have started experimenting with some of these ideas. What will come out of it, I cannot yet tell, but I’ll keep you posted.

I’m fully aware that if you worked in a small company, you’d probably be doing both jobs. ↩︎

Software on --verbose

The Netlist is a Wall