Testing/Simulating Circuits

Question

What techniques do you use for testing/simulating circuits? As at my college we use Circuit Wizard which we have to simulate our circuit on. I am looking for something a bit more advance. I have tinkered with SPICE but for more sophisticated circuits it gets more complicated and seems lack of documentation for support for microcontrollers. For designing circuits i've used eagle but it is difficult to get used to after coming from circuit wizard. What do engineers use for testing/simulating circuits? Do you use breadboarding, PCB prototype or similar?

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7022/circuit-simulation-software — endolith, Mar 02 '11 at 22:20

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 02 '11 at 21:45

whatever works - I've prototyped, built PCBs for more complex stuff, done extensive verilog simulation for large digital designs (100,000s of gates), thrown that in FPGAs for some testing and then built real silicon

Really you need to figure out the place on the cost/time to market curve that works for a particular project - for digital circuits it's worth being able to extract net lists for (verilog/vhdl) simulation, for analog stuff you use spice

Getting access to digital (verilog/vhdl) models for microcontrolers can get to be expensive - it may be faster and cheaper to just go ahead a build a pcb (or protoboard) so you can hack away - it depends on how much you value your time and your budget

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 03 '11 at 00:51

4

Spice for analog
VHDL/Verilog for inside FPGAs and with RAMs
HyperLynx for signals integrity
Vendor's custom tools for power supplies

answered Mar 03 '11 at 00:51

Brian Carlton

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 02 '11 at 23:24

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I use SPICE for simulating analogue circuits. For MCUs, I sometimes use the simulators provided with the development tools, but I usually either design a PCB, or use a manufacturer's development board, and do my testing and debugging on actual hardware.

answered Mar 02 '11 at 23:24

Leon Heller

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For integrating SPICE into an overall simulation, a quick Google search came up with eispice and MyHDL (if you know Python, but it's an easy language). For example, you can do mixed-mode simulation in Python using MyHDL and eispice: http://myhdl.org/doku.php/projects:mixedmodesimulation – Eryk Sun Mar 02 '11 at 23:29

Testing/Simulating Circuits

3 Answers3