Electrical Engineers, help an EE major out

[wyatt23]

hey all. i'm an EE major and yes, as blasphemous as it may be to all my professors, i'm a little apple fanboy.

this doesn't particularly work nicely for me when using programs like PSpice which is very essential to my being.

To any electrical engineers out there, what kind of free software do you use in your mac arsenal. i have MATLAB so that's nice, but a spice program that actually works would be nice. i can't seem to find one. also, any other helpful programs would be really nice too.

thanks alot.
wcl.

 

[khammack]

hey all. i'm an EE major and yes, as blasphemous as it may be to all my professors, i'm a little apple fanboy.

this doesn't particularly work nicely for me when using programs like PSpice which is very essential to my being.

To any electrical engineers out there, what kind of free software do you use in your mac arsenal. i have MATLAB so that's nice, but a spice program that actually works would be nice. i can't seem to find one. also, any other helpful programs would be really nice too.

thanks alot.
wcl.

I rarely need spice anymore, but I checked and it looks like ngspice installs via bsdports (now macports).

I do frequently use the geda tools, mainly icarus verilog and gtkwave.

Matlab is a good choice; I've found gnu octave to mostly be a waste of time.

There are quite a few handy open source utilities for information visualization, like gnuplot or graphviz.

Also, I often find myself processing the output of commercial tools using python (into gnuplot, graphviz, html, etc), or delving into edif file formats which is made easy with a lisp dialect. (Most schematic capture and synthesis tools output edif, which means you can check their output by reading the edif file).

FWIW, I had a prof in college who was a big apple fan, and the company I currently work for issues Macbook Pro to engineers. We often work on linux via vnc or ssh since commercial EE CAD vendors are more likely to support linux, but Macs make excellent X terminals.

-kev

 

[sushi]

As someone with an EE degree, I would like to help you out.

However, my experience was with slide rules and the Hudson manual.

Simple scientific calculators were a dream when they came out.

 

[mduser63]

I use MI-SUGAR for spice simulation (PM me if you can't find it), Icarus Verilog and GTKWave for Verilog, and Matlab. That basically covers it I think. We also have a few EE profs that are Apple fans, and quite a number of EE students with Macs.

 

[wyatt23]

WOW. thanks alot to everyone. i'm in the middle of a big design project, so when i have a chance to breathe i'm gonna take a look at all of this stuff. cept MI-SUGAR i'll hit that asap. until then, it's pspice at the computer labs on pc.


i'll post back when i get some of this stuff working. thanks a bunch!

-wcl