CircuiTikz: Antiparallel MOSFETs

Example of a CircuiTikz subcircuit demonstrating antiparallel MOSFETs and a current sense resistor.

Description

This tutorial demonstrates utilizing the CircuiTikz package of LaTeX to create reusable circuits intended to be incorporated as part of a larger document (for example, a paper, poster, or system diagram) or as a standalone vector graphics asset for use in other documentation formats.

Prerequisites

For broad compatibility, all tools utilized are constrained to those included in a standard TeX Live distribution. Therefore, texlive (linux), MacTeX (macOS), MikTex (Windows) or Container thereof is required.

Additionally, it's worth making sure that dvisvgm successfully locates the GhostScript dynamic library on your system via dvisvgm -V1.

Usage

The included Makefile contains all commands to render the graphics assets. Use the tex target to generate the PDF output and the svg target to generate the SVG output. Note that the later command is dependent on the former. For convenience, the all target runs both sequential. Additionally, the clean removes the TeX artifacts while distclean removes both artifacts and outputs.

Implementation

After considering various options, the most straightforward approach seemed to be to use latexmk to delegate latex to generate DVI->PDF and dvisvgm to convert DVI->SVG using a Makefile. As a more modern alternative, it's also possible to use xelatex to generate XDV->PDF and dvisvgm to convert XDV->SVG.

Future Work

• Add GitHub Action for continuous integration
• Avoid specifying GhostScript dynamic library path via environmental variable
• Add option for using xelatex
• Try dvisvgm TikZ package option

Challenges

It's technically possible to use the standalone LaTeX package to export bitmap and vector graphics with the convert configuration option. Martin Scharrer, the author of standalone, elaborates on that point in a Stack Exchange answer. However, I had a some difficulty getting this method to operate as intended with latexmk.

Issue #1: Shell Escape

At first, the conversion failed to execute without the latexmk -shell-escape option. Note that latexmkrc file would need entries like:

$latex = 'latex -shell-escape';

as a required option each interpreter(latex, xelatex, etc.). This would be fine if not for the second issue.

Issue #2: GhostScript

After that, the conversion failed due to dvisvgm being unable to locate the GhostScript dynamic library path. This may be a primarily macOS and Homebrew issue. With:

export LIBGS=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/ghostscript/[version]/lib/libgs.dylib

the dvisvgm generated the expected output with the Makefile.

However, as alluded to before with the -shell-escape option, the dynamic library path would need to be fixed globally for latexmk to spawn another shell to successfully execute the convert configuration option.

To avoid adding any OS-specific configuration to this codebase, this repository will assume a functional GhostScript support until this issue can be resolved.