Circuit simulators

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theruss007

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What is a good circuit simulator. One that is free, and fairy simple to use. And also is downloaded from a safe trusted virus free site. Preferbly one you have had expirience with. I want one with just general electronics i.e. transistors, resistors,diode, and some common intergrated circuits(555 timere for example).
 
Is it general electronics? I ask because it looks like its for op-amps and integrated circuits. not a little bit of everything.
 
theruss007 said:
Is it general electronics? I ask because it looks like its for op-amps and integrated circuits. not a little bit of everything.
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Its a pretty good simulator of passive circuits, too.
 

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Well you can give LTSpice a try for free or you can purchase the latest version of Orcad with PSpice and all the trimmings for ~$36K-$40K, or something else for a tad less and give it a try. Myself, I did get the Orcad/Cadence package in 1999 just before Ver. 10 came out for ~$17K. I have been using LTSpice for free for about 9-10 weeks and I'm much happier with the flexability, ease of use and fast learning curve. What do you have to lose if it's free? Are you rich or are you a student?

Regards,
Merv
 
theruss007 said:
I see your point and will give it a try. WHy are they so expensive it seems stupid to price it that high.
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Those applications are priced at what the market will bear. They're very versitile and come with HUGE libraries, etc, etc, which is to say nothing about how small and larger firms can distribute costs via bean-counters. I did gain great return from having those capabilities at hand as a one man band back then. Retired now and loving just dabbling without a deadline hanging overhead or clients changing specs midstream.
 
For those people not running MS Windows, you may be interested in QUCS, which is an open source circuit simulator project which runs on Linux, Mac (and Windows too). I've been using it for several months and I'm very impressed. The biggest drawback at the moment is the incomplete documentation. So, it can be a bit slow getting up to speed.
Qucs project: Quite Universal Circuit Simulator
 
theruss007 said:
I see your point and will give it a try. WHy are they so expensive it seems stupid to price it that high.
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They are used by professional engineers, whose companies are willing to pay the money because it is worth it to them.
Go ahead with LTSpice, it is free and widely used, so you will be able to ask questions either at this forum or the Yahoo support group:

**broken link removed**
 
the student version of orcad pspice might be good to try to. if you aim to move into industry then you might want to get used to how orcad works. not sure how limited the SV is though. the professional version is quite nice

usually its against the license of a student version to do any work on it that you intend on selling.


hehe i think a full version of cadence's ICFB design framework II is like 1.2 million if you get all the bells and whistles... quite insane
 
What are your expectations from the simulator? Are you looking for detailed and exact results or proof of concept type functionality?

ALL simulators produce results only as good as their models… in other words, once you move beyond passive components (and you still have to enter the paracitic’s) the results will only be a reasonable approximation of the real world circuit. Better results goes along with more $$$.

Sometimes you have a working circuit in font of you on the bench and the circuit just won’t simulate… the converse is also true… simulates like a charm but won’t run in the real world for love or money.
 
Simulators are good as you are close to digital as possible ( which theoretical and real worlds are the same), when you move to Analog, You are as far as possible to the real work, what you will get it -if you are lucky enough- is what theory tells you and when you entered to SENSORS world, no any simulator can help you ( as far as I know ).

I vote for LT Spice, I've used it during my study to verify my allot of answers.
 
You do realize of course that there is no such thing as “digital”… it’s all analog inside that just happens to operate between two fixed voltage levels.
 
Not in a simulator indulis, you can black box the digital portion of things under behavioral models, they compute multiple orders of magnitude faster than a true analog simulation of the same circuit would.

Being an armchair student of quantum physics the more basic nature of the universe is increasingly viewed as discretely measurable units. Basically on a quantum level things are more digital than they are analog. On the macro scale things behave more like would be typically associated with the term analog.
 
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Right, and as I said in the quantum world everything is at some point quantized into a discrete packet, much more digital than analog.
 
Sceadwian said:
Basically on a quantum level things are more digital than they are analog. On the macro scale things behave more like would be typically associated with the term analog.
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But we're talking about the macro world here. If you wish to insist on a truly quantum-level, digital description, then we are forced into counting individual electrons running through the circuit. No thanks!
 
For a hobby no kidding Redbelly! It'd be an absolute nightmare.

Scientists developing the technology that we won't see in practical devices in our lifetimes however are working that close to the quantum level now.

Analog vs digital is more how you chose to look at it rather than one existing or the other. It is what it is though, the analog world is actually the non-reality, it only exists because of the human lack of spatial resolution to the scales where the fundamental basis of what actually makes the stuff of us up actually does what it does. We can only perceive it mathematically and even then just barely. Transcendental numbers are a good example, we can't calculate their specific values, but they do have discrete values.
 
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