Richard-

In general I agree with your posts, but this one is just ridiculous. I mean, that's such an antiquated view on design that I'm surprised you're getting anywhere with it. If people still used CD4017s we wouldn't be where we are today. Today's RTL designs are WAY WAY WAY too complicated for a schematic. Think about how many forests you'd need to chop down in order to print out schematics for a single core modern processor. If a schematic were the right tool people WOULD use them, but clearly a design with more than a few gates is NOT the right application for a schematic. This has nothing to do with the intelligence of the designers. It has to do with the scale and complexity of today's projects. I can write RTL much much faster than you can draw a schematic and I can verify it much much faster than you'll ever be able to verify your schematic. Why would I not use RTL??? Furthermore any logic synthesizer will be able to do a much much better job of optimization that any old school techniques that once worked in the 1970s when playing games with 74ls parts.

With regards to 13 different ways to describe an E sheet schematic, there are just as many ways (if not more) to draw the schematic. Everyone has their own styles. That's the beauty of digital design....there are many ways to solve problems. One of the beauties of RTL is that given a module anyone can figure out how it works/what it does in a matter of minutes by writing a quick test bench. You seem to think that RTL and schematics accomplish different things...clearly they don't. Any flexibility one has in a design will be exhibited in both an RTL and schematic implementation. Have you ever written RTL?

As far as a 1000 page HDL listing representing a single E sheet schematic, that's an absurd statement and just shows that you apparently don't know what you're talking about. One line of RTL could be an inverter or an instantiation of an entire core of a multiprocessor system. No questions asked 1000 pages of any reasonable HDL (eg not 1000 pages of comments and inverters) will without question be unrepresentable in any E sheet schematic (unless you're using sub micron fonts...).

With regards to people not being as smart today as they were back "in your day", that's just absurd. Are you really so caught up in that nonsense? Talk about grumpy and ignorant. I'm a PhD student in EE and I hate to tell you this, but there are some very very very smart people out there today. In fact, I'm sure that there are many that are much smarter than you. Generations don't become less intelligent than previous ones...a guy named Darwin once explained this phenomenon... I'm not saying that there aren't total morons out there, but come on, what a dumb thing to say on your part.

D