BTW... I should mention... I first ended up with a copy of Pulsonix as an
inexpensive way to get ahold of John Warner's SIMetrix SPICE simulator. Since
SIMetrix started being distributed by Cantena, the price rose significantly,
and while they have added a bunch of extra features, for the features *I*
needed Pulsonix was still -- by far -- the least expensive option. (John sold
me on SIMetrix while I was in college... the college had a site license for
HSPICE, and while almost everyone else was slugging it out through
hand-entered netlists, I generally was able to finish assignments in less time
with SIMetirx. In that case, I came upon SIMetrix because they had a student
version that understood BSIM3 models, which the student versions of, e.g.,
PSpice didn't. Plus John Warner was still popping up on Usenet every now and
again, having debates with the likes of Kevin Aylward of SuperSpice fame.
) Later on we needed to do a few simple boards, and although we do have a
copy of PADS kicking around for "high end" boards, it was easiest (and *much*
cheaper than buying another PADS seat -- the outright purchase price of a
Pulsonix PCB is less than we pay annual in PADS maintenance) to get a
pin-limited upgrade to Pulsonix to lay them out.
As far as I can tell, "Pulsonix SPICE," as it's called, is not a particularly
popular configuration; I think the number of times I've seen people on the
Yahoo! group discuss it could be counted on one hand. That's a shame, I
think, since the combination of Pulsonix PCB and SPICE is quite powerful and
inexpensive.
---Joel