Recently as I am working with the hardware design group developing an ASIC. And I am drawing a lot of timing diagrams for which I am using Microsoft EXCEL to draw them, as it is easy to import to word document. But, things are getting more and more difficult with EXCEL.
My question? How do you guys draw timing diagrams? Is there any easy tool out there?
Some time ago we used IGOR for all kind of measurement data visualization. But its not for free, if thats a requirement.
If you like LaTeX and don't mind the extra steps to get the generated image into Word (on which I guess you depend), tikz-timing is very nice. I find it very easy to use and the diagrams look very good!
Apart from that, the companies I worked in so far used Visio for this kind of tasks.
I have the same problem and tried the following tools:
After trying all these I now ended up using Visio and pen&pencil. All other programs lacked support for adding arrows/relationships between signals easily. In Visio such things are absolutely easy. And you can export the diagrams directly to powerpoint or even as pdf for using them in latex.
Timing Designer and Timing Diagrammer are the two main commercial programs. They are similar in functions and user interface. Both have OLE and other export capability.
If you are happy with simpler waveforms on a regular grid, you can quickly create something with Timing Font or XWave (linked from the first link). Another option would be Gnome Dia, a simple vector drawing program.
I find it necessary to add TimingAnalyzer to the mix. It is only in Beta but at least he is actively developing it. ~T