Circuit board/breadboard simulator for PC

January 24, 2005 11:51 PM

What's a good circuit board/breadboard simulator for PC?

I've been reading articles on howstuffworks.com about boolean logic
and using electronic logic gates but I can't seem to find a good circuit board emulator.

posted by Edible Energy to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Are you willing to spend money? If so, you might consider LogicWorks, which is available for about $80. It has both schematic capture and digital simulation capabilities, albeit somewhat limited. It is upward compatible with the much more expensive, but more capable, DesignWorks Professional.
posted by RichardP at 1:08 AM on January 25, 2005

Look into the gEDA project. It looks like they have at least one spice simulator. I highly recommend spice to everyone, even dabblers. It's simple to learn.
posted by breath at 2:37 AM on January 25, 2005

There are several types of circuit emulation. I'm not sure if you want to emulate at the transistor level, which is what SPICE would enable, or at the gate level which a simulator like Verilog, VHDL or what have you would do.

If you want to model each transistor in an and gate then SPICE is the way to go. There are a variety of packages available from no cost to 10's of thousands of dollars. No cost would be fine for you. I haven't run SPICE on a PC in over a decade so I can't give a specific recommendation.

There is a free web interface to spice http://lux.dmcs.p.lodz.pl/~swierczu/index.php>here. I haven't tried it.

For logic simulation I'd recommend Verilog. It's syntax is less difficult to comprehend than VHDL if you know C like languages. Here's a list of free simulators.

Both SPICE and Verilog are languages to describe circuits so most of them will not have schematic capture (for free)
posted by substrate at 6:10 AM on January 25, 2005

For SPICE stuff, I have found Micro-Cap to be full of great features. The demo is limited but still usable.

For digital stuff, I've used MAX-PLUS for Altera, which seems to be outdated. Its used for designing for older Altera FPGAs but I remember it allowed you to lay down gates and then simulate pretty nicely.

The learning curve for both of those might be too steep.

I haven't tried it but it is free: MMLogic seems to be a learning tool for digital logic.
posted by toftflin at 6:44 AM on January 25, 2005

Check out the resources for 6.004. JSim in particular is a nice little integrated SPICE-like environment (or used to be, when I took the class). No circuit layout, but you can simulate at the gate level by using the prebuilt gate library (nominal.jsim I think).

The class is about learning digital logic, so you may be well to peruse the course materials, made available to all thanks to OpenCourseWare.
posted by breath at 8:58 AM on January 25, 2005