Comparison of eda software

Can also be used for schematic entry and PCB design. A printed circuit board design program for Microsoft Windows.

FreePCB allows for up to 16 copper layers, both metric and US customary units, and export of designs in Gerber format. Windows , Mac , Linux. Protoboard view, schematic view, PCB view, Code firmware view. Includes customizable design rule checker.

Includes common shaped boards like Arduino and Raspberry Pi shields. Allows spline curve traces. Only two layers top and bottom. Outputs gerbers. Linux , Mac , Windows. It is a commercial product that comes under a shareware license, which is suitable for small development teams. It supports many high capacity devices and speeds up the overall design process significantly.

Download Xilinx Vivado. Quite Universal Circuit Simulator or QUCS is one of the best free electronic design automation tools for electronic devices manufacturers. It provides an easy to use graphical interface that makes circuit simulation hassle-free and faster than ever. Moreover, the schematic capture and simulation abilities is also a plus point for chip designers. Features of Quite Universal Circuit Simulator.

Download Quite Universal Circuit Simulator. SmartSim is a free yet feature-rich EDA program for digital logic circuit design and their simulation. SmartSim can create complex logic circuits using custom components. This makes it a viable solution for a large number of electrical device engineers. Download SmartSim. Electric is one of the oldest EDA tools to feature in this list. However, even though it was released almost three decades ago, Electric is still being used by a considerable number of chip designers.

This surely speaks of the success this EDA has achieved over these years. You can use Electric for drawing custom schematics and PCB layouts at ease. Instead of manipulating the polygons on different levels of the wafer, like done by many IC creation tools, Electric views its layout as a connected circuitry. Download Electric. Gnucap is a mixed-signal circuit simulator that runs on virtually any computing platform.

The name stands for Gnu Circuit Analysis Package, which is quite self-explanatory itself. It can work with several types of parameters, measures, and design models at ease.

Moreover, Gnucap employs many modern algorithms to improve simulation performance. Download Gnucap. The Falstad Circuit Emulator is a very popular web-based emulator. You can literally emulate any types of circuitry using its web editor. Moreover, this emulator application is developed as a Java-applet but also offers a JavaScript port. So overall, the Falstad emulator is popular mainly due to its simplistic design yet high accessibility. Features of Falstad Circuit Emulator. Go To Falstad Circuit Emulator.

It has been enjoying growing popularity among academics and open source developers due to its ease of use and significant performance benefits. Moreover, since it is an opensource project, third-party developers are allowed to fork this for their own projects without any legal issues. Download Verilator. XCircuit is a cross-platform EDA tool for drawing publication-quality circuit diagrams and other related figures.

It can be used for producing circuit netlists based on schematic capture. Another great advantage is that most PCB manufacturers will accept Eagle. KiCAD is another low-cost alternative to Eagle. KiCAD is free and open source. Pulsonix is another easy-to-use schematic capture and PCB design tool, which has been praised for its intuitive user interface.

Unique to Pulsonix is the ability to embed components within layers of the PCB, and it also supports flex-rigid designs. Multisim is an easy-to-use, graphical simulation software. Engineers can run simulations with virtual instruments, such as an oscilloscope, that mimic how an engineer would simulate in the real world. These virtual instruments have made the software popular in the academic world, but professional engineers have also benefitted from the visual-style of design and simulation, which is highly advanced in terms of accuracy.

Another bonus is its project management tools. As schematics gets more complex, the design can naturally become difficult to understand. Common applications include data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision.

It provides engineers with a tool for designing simple or complex, multilayer PCBs. CADSTAR spans schematic capture, variant management, placement, automatic and high-speed routing, signal integrity, power integrity, EMC analysis, design rule checks and production of manufacturing data. It provides an integrated design environment to designers of RF electronic products such as mobile phones, pagers, wireless networks, satellite communications, radar systems, and high-speed data links.

The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and electronic technicians to create electronic schematics, perform mixed-signal simulation and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards. The process of circuit design can cover systems ranging from complex electronic systems all the way down to the individual transistors within an integrated circuit.

For simple circuits the design process can often be done by one person without needing a planned or structured design process, but for more complex designs, teams of designers following a systematic approach with intelligently guided computer simulation are becoming increasingly common. In integrated circuit design automation, the term "circuit design" often refers to the step of the design cycle which outputs the schematics of the integrated circuit.

Typically this is the step between logic design and physical design. A small group of maintainers and the user community contribute to the ngspice project by providing new features, enhancements and bug fixes. KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation EDA. It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components. Altium Limited is a publicly traded software company that provides PC-based electronics design software for engineers who design printed circuit boards.

Its products are designed for use in a Microsoft Windows environment and used in industries such as automotive, aerospace, defense, and telecommunications. Its flagship product, Altium Designer, is a software for unified electronics design. It is a provider of electronic design automation EDA software that helps engineers design products such as cellular phones, wireless networks, radar, satellite communications systems, and high-speed digital wireline infrastructure.

Applications include electronic system level ESL , high-speed digital, RF-Mixed signal, device modeling, RF and Microwave design for commercial wireless, aerospace, and defense markets. Momentum is 3-D planar EM simulation software for electronics and antenna analysis, a partial differential equation solver of Maxwell's equations based on the method of moments. It is a 3-D planar electromagnetic EM simulator used for passive circuit analysis.