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Electronics Workbench in its various levels of sophistication is the most widely used PC-based EDA program in the world. With its combination of schematic design, Spice simulation, and graphical output, it has attracted some 130,000 users so the announcement of the most significant revision in the product's history is big news indeed.
The most obvious change is that Electronics Workbench is now the name for a whole family of products including ultiBOARD and ultiROUTE, and the schematic and simulation program is now known as multiSIM. More than just a name change however, multiSIM is a major advance on the previous Electronics Workbench Professional.
On the schematic capture side, multiSIM allows any circuit to be drawn, not one containing only components from the library. A component editor enables a symbol to be created and edited, with the component based on a library model. Footprints can be assigned (significant for PCB layout) and user-defined fields (e.g cost and lead time) added. This means that multiSIM offers full schematics and the power of simulation in one easy-to-use program which runs on standard Windows PCs. And that in turn means that every engineer can have a complete set of design tools on the desktop trips to the design lab may become much less frequent.
The big new aspect of multiSIM's simulation capabilities is the simulation of programmable logic chips including FPGAs. The VHDL language is already available, and Verilog is being introduced soon a choice which is unique at this level of accessibility.
The VHDL synthesis includes all the major manufacturers in its list of supported devices, with the latest up-to-date code. And the VHDL simulation will work with the SPICE simulation, something which until now has been associated with much higher cost systems; but multiSIM is all about breaking down such barriers. It's a dramatic step forward in the development of the world's favourite simulation and schematic design program. |
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