Hardware Calculator

40 hardware design calculators whose every number traces to a standard, with a live schematic of the circuit you are sizing. Trace width to IPC-2152, clearance to IPC-2221C, impedance to IPC-2141, crystal load caps and oscillator start-up margin to ST AN2867, I²C pull-ups to NXP UM10204. Try it right here: this is the real app, loaded live from this page's source.

Install it for your AI and terminal

The page above runs in your browser with no install. Install the app to let your AI open and fill calculations for you, use the CLI, and keep your settings.

adom-wiki pkg install adom/hardware-calculator
hwcalc --ai-thread "<name>" start        # opens the calculator in a Hydrogen tab

Say it to your AI

• "with the hardware calculator, what trace width for 3 A at 20 °C rise on 2 oz?"
• "size the load caps for a 12 pF crystal and check the gain margin with 25 mA/V gm"
• "hardware calculator: clearance for 300 V on an external coated layer"
• "open the hardware calculator on a buck from 12 V to 3.3 V at 2 A, 500 kHz"

Or from the terminal, no server needed: hwcalc calc trace I=3 dT=20 oz=2, hwcalc calc crystal CL=12p Cs=4p --svg osc.svg.

Why you can trust it

• Standards checked for currency. IPC-2221 is Rev C (Dec 2023), IPC-2152 is still Rev 0 (2009), and so on. Every source, its revision and the date it was checked is in SOURCES.md.
• No undisclosed fits. Where a standard is chart-only (IPC-2152) the published curve fit is named; where a table is paywalled (IPC-2221 Table 6-1) the values were cross-checked against two independent reproductions.
• Tested against the sources' own worked examples, for example AN2867's 8 MHz crystal: gm_crit 0.23 mA/V and gain margin 107. 140 automated checks run on every change.
• Honest limits. Closed-form impedance says ±5–10 % and to confirm with your fab's field solver; unmodelled effects are stated under each result.

Contributing

Anyone in the adom org can publish. Every change follows the hwcalc-calculator-standards skill (Skills tab, Dev): source fetched and revision confirmed, a test reproducing the source's worked example, a labelled drawing for any circuit, and the sources register updated. Releases follow hwcalc-release (Skills tab, Publish). A change pushed to this page's source shows up in the calculator above on the next page load.