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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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • I'm definitely interested in this topic, I sometimes used free online tools such as circuitlab. I would rather like to learn about the differences between the online and offline tools.

    Furthermore it would be interesting to put it in a broader scope. We hear a lot about digital twins currently. I think linking circuit simulation, modelling and digital twins will be very beneficial for the electronics community.

    BTW, I voted for a workshop, but an experimenting challenge is my second choice.

  • I never actually used any circuit simulator, but that's something that I was willing to try.  I do love a hands on approach - if it burns, it burns - but because it is mainly on cheap components.. Slight smile

    I'm going to give it a go

  • Simulation is useful if you're trying to figure out a filter configuration.  It's been a while since i've played with PSpice

  • in reply to gpolder

    Hi Gerrit,

    Interesting concept. I had not connected such a thought before, but now that you mention it, I see a netlist is like a digital twin, and since simulation software also can contain the detail on the signals in and out of the circuit as well, it can essentially provide the information on what can be measured and what can be controlled. I wonder what simulation manufacturers will be first to provide digital twin export capability from their software. This could be helpful for troubleshooting problems in the field with complex multi-board/module industrial products for instance.

    My colleague and I briefly discussed digital twins in a podcast incidentally,  "The Industrial Metaverse" - All Things Tech Podcast  but more generally since we had not considered this. Very neat idea.

  • in reply to gpolder
    gpolder said:
    an experimenting challenge is my second choice.

    That's what I voted for.

  • in reply to shabaz

    You can simulate almost everything using spice, you only have to translate whatever you want to simulate to an electric model. I used to simulate thermal performance of heatsinks, I know someone that used spice to simulate his Invesment and savings.

  • in reply to shabaz

    at my institute we are making digital twins of crops, in that sense a digital twin of an electronic circuit should be easy.

    image