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ADS1118: General Knowledge Question

Onur YILDIZ
Prodigy 100 points
Part Number: ADS1118

Hello,

First of all, we have designed a system which uses this ADC as an important part of our project, and we have decided to register our project for a government grant. But we have confused what is the terminology, which we are dealing with this ADC.

We generally use the terms

  • Hardware Design => as sytem architecture design (not just PCB design)
  • Firmware Design => as sytem driver design (a required program which converts the upper level software to bit level machine codes according to system architecture) (we can only design the firmware if we have designed the hardware according to upper meaning of hardware)
  • Software Design => end user level software of the component, which always known as Python, C# etc.

We have only designed the PCB and required software which does the SPI communication in order to configure the ADC by reading the ADC datasheet.

We did NOT designed the machine understanding part (language) of the ADC, but we are reading and understanding the System Architecture. We are just using it, and we did not designed any driver, or hardware on VLSI level, indeed we did not designed the architecture of the SoP (IC). However my colleagues say:

"We designed Hardware, because we designed the required PCB according to datasheet.".

And also since we are dealing with the low level SPI communication (i.e. 10100..s) and ADC bitwise configuration directly, some of us want to write as:

"We have designed Firmware and Software".

However, I prefer to say:

"We are designed the required PCB (not the Hardware or the Firmware of the ADC) for the ADC, and we have designed a software which can interact with the firmware of the ADC and does the configuration of the hardware.".

We have really confused with this issue. Could you please help and inform us?

Does PCB design of such a component could be considered as "Hardware Design"? Did we do any "Firmware Design" with this PCB and software design? Or we did "hardware and firmware" design of a PCB (is not it ridiculous?)??

Best Regards,

ONUR YILDIZ

  • 0
    TI__Guru** 113765 points

    Hi Onur,

    I consider Hardware Design to be a system level design and board layout will all components required to make that system work.  A system design uses many individual components such as resistors, capacitors, ADCs (the ADS1118 for example), DACs, micros, power regulators, connectors, etc. to make a complete hardware system.

    Firmware Design is also a part of the system level design and not the individual components.  The system level firmware brings the usage of the hardware to a usable form.  The ADS1118 is a device.  To utilize this device, you must write a firmware application to communicate, configure and read the ADC results from the device.

    So if you schematically created and built a system using many components you have a Hardware Design.  If you wrote code to make your system work, you have a Firmware Design.  If you created code for a PC to communicate and display data with your system you have a Software Design.

    Best regards,

    Bob B

  • 0 in reply to Bob Benjamin
    Prodigy 100 points

    Hi Bob,

    Thank you very much and we are really appreciated to you for your answer. You have saved us from a really big confusion.

    Best Regards,

    Onur YILDIZ