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How Interested Are You In Learning More About Circuit Simulation?

rscasny

Over the last two years we have been approached by different vendors who have circuit simulators of introducing the element14 community to them. Another vendor recently approached us, so I thought I would get a conversation going to gauge your interest and discover what you might like to do with circuit simulators.

There are plenty of simulators on the market today. Some are well known, others are not. For those of you who may not be familiar with circuit simulators, they are software that emulates the behavior of a real hardware circuit before it is built. The circuit simulator can be used to verify a hardware design.

I'd prefer not to just say here is the simulator and here's the specs and what it can do. I'd rather have community members get the opportunity to play around with it and report to the community what they discovered. 

I know this is a big area and I expect in the future these simulators will become very sophisticated and part of every electronic engineer's toolbox. For now (and for planning purposes), I'd like some feedback on these polls.

Thank you for taking the time to vote.

Randall

-element14 Team

  • I use simulation quite a lot.

    For circuits I use LT-Spice - free from Analog Devices at: https://www.analog.com/en/index.html

    For systems I use MATLAB and SIMULINK, Maple, paper and calulator or Excel depending on the problem, where I am am and mood.

    There are many spice based simulators and LT-Spice is one of the best. It was developed by Linear Technology for the design of their own chips and is a very good SPICE type simulator. It's always been free and that has continued since Analog bought Linear Technology and the original developer of LT SPice left.

    I find PSpice far too long winded now - in the good old days (30 years ago) I had a license for it and it was quite easy to use. I've played with the TI version and found it a lot of hassle.

    I voted for a Roadtest but anything other than a Webinar would be good. If you do an Essentials please don't do a single company one - get someone un-biased to write it.

    MK

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    A little-known fact, is that spice can also be used for chip design, i.e. custom ASICs. I'm sure there are more advanced tools (I'm not a chip designer!) but at uni, we used spice to simulate our custom chip designs (since we couldn't afford to get them made in a semiconductor factory : ). Any feature on the chip (e.g. a transistor) would just translate to the spice model for that (based on whatever chip factory settings were chosen). It's not the lowest level of simulation, nor the highest, but good enough to try out simple chips.

  • in reply to kmikemoo
    kmikemoo said:
    Of course, I don't remember paying for PSpice in those days either.

    A branded version is available at no cost from TI.

  • I used to use PSpice all the time in teaching power and electronics.  It was fantastic.  Do the simulation.  Build the circuit.  Measure.  Explain the difference.  I also used it to build series of graphics to demonstrate concepts.  I do miss it.  Of course, I don't remember paying for PSpice in those days either.

  • in reply to mp2100

    I voted "other" because for some simulators the learning might need to be (say) "online training" or "webinar" because some are hard to use without that (and some specific types of simulators are near-impossible with no training).

    If it's a "general-purpose" type of circuit simulation (e.g. not RF or math or electromagnetic or component-specific etc), then the underlying system uses software called "SPICE", and probably the easiest one to use for beginners might be Multisim, but it's a shame it is so expensive usually, way more than it should be. If that product ever comes up for a RoadTest and you (or anyone) wishes to apply, then I'd be happy to do a 20-min training session or video recording, since it is easily possible to teach it that quickly.

    Definitely worth trying a SPICE simulator, but as mentioned some of them have more of a learning overhead. Lots of people use LTSpice, and while it is not as quick to pick up as Multisim, there should be lots of videos of that, but I've not watched any and don't know which ones to recommend : ( 

  • I  would love to learn a simulator but it's not my background. I'm sure I could get a lot of good understanding from the clever e14 people who do test this simulator. 

  • in reply to robogary

    Multisim is very good. Very low learning curve, because it tries to give measurements to a "running circuit" whereas most other simulators only provide results after a simulation has executed. 

    However Multisim is still doing the same thing underneath that other circuit simulators are doing, but with the difference that it is kind of faking it by running the simulation repeatedly with small time increments, so it looks as if it is a live running circuit. It's very neat though.

    It is a bit expensive but I once found an online store with an offer for families with kids in school (you had to submit proof of that), and then it was reduced to about $100 so I purchased it. The version I purchased has a circuit size limit, but I rarely hit the limit, since often just a subset of a larger circuit might need to be simulated.

    If you get stuck let me know, I'm fairly familiar with it!

  • "Simulators" covers a very wide range of tools from various vendors. Most engineers probably think of circuit-level tools when you use the word "simulation." For example, a SPICE-based tool. These are useful for evaluating the performance of multiple connected components, across various conditions. (Provided appropriate models are available for all the components!)

    However, I think many component vendors offer simulators which are, essentially, single-component simulation tools. These muddy the water a little bit because they get lumped in with SPICE-based simulators, even though they are not! These allow you to build characterization graphs (or models) for a single specific component. For example, KEMET has K-SIM (for capacitors), Diodes, Inc has one for their components, and many (or all?) FET/IGBT/SIC/GAN vendors also offer tools for their semiconductors. These are far less generic tools and are, essentially, digital datasheets. e.g., you aren't simulating a SiC transistor with some capacitors and the effects of the PCB traces...

    So, tldr, I'd be careful to lump all simulators together.

  • I use a pretty old version of Multisim to validate designs before prototyping them.  Something with more current devices would be most welcome!

  • I dont use a circuit simulator because I grew up without one, but do see the usefulness & advantages. Reliable, easy to use sim tools are not in my hobby budget.

    A circuit simulator that also provides a good schematic would be awesome, and a tool that included Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, RPi Pico and variants, Adafruit sensors, etc.. for schematics would be awesome.  

    I voted for Road Test since that would document a real user experience. A workshop is great too, but usually those are demonstrated by experts, makes the difficult look easy.

     Just for fun, I'm going to give MultiSim a shot since it is the tool used by my local community college.