software for electrical simulation of a design circuit

I can let you have my copy of LTspice for not too much money. :^) (it's sorta a lingua franca here on SED.)

George H.

On Thu, 1 Oct 2015 07:19:22 -0700 (PDT), George Herold Gave us:

Real goo job of helping out there, Heroldetus.

ELDO is a high-end (Mentor Graphics/expensive) tool meant for mixed-signal chip design.

I have no experience with Proteus

LTspice is free! But has limitations if you want to design complex chips or systems. Its schematic entry is clumsy and its symbol library methodology is just plain gawd-awful. ...Jim Thompson

We use LT Spice in our shop. Works great. Free.

Am 01.10.2015 um 16:32 schrieb Jim Thompson: ...

Jim, I cannot repeat it often enough, the schematic editor is great! It uses unusual keys, ok, but you can place your parts and draw wires just across them (no need to stop at any pin). First it looks like you were producing a single big short circuit but if you end the wire, all shorts are removed. Also, if you place a part over an existing wire, the piece 'inside' the part is removed. I've never seen an editor that works that efficient! LTSpice is fast and if you can trust Mike Engelhardt (the creator), it simulates the physics i.e. if your simulation does not show the behavior of your circuit, you did not simulate your circuit (forgot some parasitic L or C or there is something wrong with the models). Creating or importing third party models usually is pain, that's right.

Cheers

Robert

Everyone has their own favorite schematic entry tool. Mine is the venerable MicroSim PSpice Schematics... been using it for at least

I have re-assigned hot keys so that LTspice schematic entry is essentially the same as PSpice's.

However I still find the graphics rather crude and the symbol editor lacking.

Device libraries are not an issue... since I work with so many different semiconductor foundries I always place a .LIB statement on the schematic anyway, so I rarely have any model issues between PSpice and LTspice.

Symbols are the annoying part. If someone sends me an LTspice schematic that had symbols not in the same directory as the schematic, LTspice labels "unknown symbol". When you close the schematic the reference names for the symbols disappear :-( ...Jim Thompson

I don't have experience with the other two, but for board-level mixed- signal design I've found LTSpice to work quite well.

Probably a good part of the reason it works well for me is because I keep within it's limits: I don't ever try to simulate an entire board with it. Rather, I identify critical (hopefully small) areas of the board where I want to double-check or refine my results with simulation, and I simulate those.

I could see using a "big" SPICE program if I needed to verify an entire chip design before tape out, but that's not the world in which I work.