: Well, I give up. Accusing me of being a shill for CircuitLogix is too
: much.
Well, no offense intended. Sorry!
: p.s. I am a design engineer with Motorola and I also work as an
: adjunct professor at Texas A&M.
Bully for you!
: I could care less about whether you
: download a free version of CircuitLogix, I was more interested in
: sharing some good news about free simulation. Obviously, I shouldn't
: have bothered.
We are leery of folks posting "look at this great new free
tool" messages here since free tools from commerical vendors usually
have strings attached [1]. The classic examples are ExpressPCB, which
offers free design/layout software, but locks you into a proprietary
output file format usable only at ExpressPCB; and Eagle, whose free
version is wildly popular with students, but is essentially crippled
since it limits you to two layers and a fairly small board area. Once
you bump up against the limits of the freebie Eagle, you've got to pay
for the full-up version [2].
FWIW, there are lots of freebie and open-source simulators of various
flavors out there, including:
LTSpice -- closed source SPICE with integrated schematic capture.
Totally rocks!
http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/
ngspice -- open source SPICE 3f5. Still uses a CLI, and not as
optimized as LTSpice, but it works.
http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
GnuCap -- Analog simulator with internal engine a generation or two
ahead of regular SPICE. Open source.
Can do event-driven simulation as
well as continuous time. Still uses CLI, and can read
SPICE netlists (with some caveats).
http://www.gnucap.org/
QUCS -- A spiffy new GUI-based simulation environment which claims
to do all kinds of simulation. Open source.
Incorporates schematic
capture front end. I believe they have some work to do
until it's complete.
http://qucs.sourceforge.net/
Icarus Verilog --
Excellent Verilog open-source simulator run from the
command line. Used with GTKWave for waveform viewing, it's
a powerful tool for Verilog design.
http://icarus.com/eda/verilog/
http://home.nc.rr.com/gtkwave/
Alliance VHDL --
French university project providing a chip design tool
suite. Includes VHDL simulator. I've never used it so
I know very little about it.
http://www-asim.lip6.fr/recherche/alliance//
TkGate -- GUI based logic simulator. More of an eductional tool than
a professional design tool, but it's cool nonetheless.
Open-source.
http://www.tkgate.org/
PSpice -- Years ago PSpice 6.x from MicroSim was downloadable off the
web for free. Is it still around?
Tina -- TI's simulation program. Version 7 is a free download. Is
it some kind of "me too" response to LTSpice? I haven't
used it.
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/tina-ti.html
Besides these, there's also MyHDL, PyHDL, FreeHDL, regular Spice3f5,
and plenty of other free simulators out there available on the
web. And don't get me started on schematic capture, layout tools,
or chip design editors!
You can follow the open-source EDA tool space here:
http://www.opencollector.org/
As you can see, CircuitL*gix is just another entrant into a very
crowded market space. Maybe it's got some better features than some
other tool? But from your initial postings it didn't make it seem
so. Also, commercial giveaways are always to be regarded with
suspicion. And we're a very cynical group in any event.
Cheers,
Stuart
[1] LTSpice being a notable exception, probably because they make
their money from chips, not from software.
[2] Nothing wrong with that, since the freebie tool is a loss leader.
But anybody using it should think twice about the long-term dangers of
vendor lock-in before they have too many designs done in such a tool.
Same for CircuitL*gix, I would imagine.