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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

  • The benefits of Spice simulations!

    The image below(it is from a ppt presentation I created a while back for some radio talk) shows (in this example using Multisim) a simulation of an entire SDR receiver. Going from this to a real prototype was therefore easy. I went directly from this to a perfboard prototype which worked first time, with perhaps a tweak or two, and then to a PCB layout which too worked fine (I think there were 2 bodge wires, but that's my error, not Spice error!). The need for the few tweaks was because Spice isn't intended to be for RF applications, and I didn't have good models for a few of the parts as a result. Anyway, it saved days/weeks of effort to have done the simulation first.

    image

  • I’ve used simulation a few times (LTSpice) where I’m not sure of something, but I find the tool difficult to pick up and understand.  I also find it difficult to find models to import, and even how to do it.  I don’t know if his is because LTSpice is so old-Skool or if it’s just the MacOS version of it.  I have found that the results it shows aren’t always accurate - down to the model I presume - and that to recognise that situation requires prior experience and knowledge.  Thus, I’m never quite sure whether to trust what I see or not!  Getting to grips with simulation is something I’d like to do and see more info on.  I’m happy with the workshop approach, but it would be good if that were followed by some form of competition/roadtest/experiment

  • Have wanted to try one of these, but have just never gotten around to it.