ViaDesiger Circuit Simulator - Opinions

Excuse me for responding to my own post, but is no one really interested in this? Check the menu items at the top of their homepage. There is more than first meets the eye.

Apart from the monthly payment plan, the software offers a rather unique design approach.

Seems like instead of part numbers for op amps, etc., you fill in the desired parameters in a "wizard". Then you can find an amp to match in the real world whenever the project is built.

Sort of reverse of the usual procedure. And no more need to import models for missing parts, apparently.

Is this a reasonable system in practice, or not?

Richard Clarke

I was hoping someone who had used it would respond. It looks totally weird but is "powered by Mentor Graphics" and quite cheap. They do a 30 day free trial so I might give it ago some time but I'm not unhappy with LTSpice. (Except when Microchip op amp models go unstable :-)

Michael Kellett

"Mentor Graphics" is certainly a marquee name. The last time I used Mentor it was to model parallelism with VHDL. At that time, Mentor was run from an HP mainframe and used a clunky Command Line Interface.

I didn't know that Mentor had SPICE functionality. Or, maybe it's the ViaDesigner/Mentor mashup that has the SPICE functionality.

As you say, "I'm not unhappy with LTSpice." Except once, earlier last year, when Jim Thompson and I horsed around with UJTs. That's when LTSpice started taking minutes, if not half hours, to number crunch.

ViaDesigner probably excels at number crunching. At the end of the day, if one consistently waits on LTSpice to complete its computations then ViaDesigner probably makes sense. Otherwise, it may be overkill.

When it's as cheap as LTS I'll give it a go. :->

I was going to reply that you'd forever after be at the mercy of the vendor for access to your own work. that may or may not be compatible with your business model.