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A digital logic designer and circuit simulator
- anon_tor_12345 6y agosorry i'm a newb in this space (getting into fpga dev through chisel): is this basically ltspice? or is it more powerful? i'm guessing it's more powerful because you can specify asics using vhdl/verilog and you can also export the entire circuit (netlist?) to vhdl/verilog. basically i'm wondering if i can use this to start to understand verilog/vhdl since it could function is a graphical frontend. i'm also wondering if there's more mature tool for that same purpose.
- madengr 6y agoNo, it’s not LTSPICE. It’s not more or less powerful; it’s different use case. SPICE does transient and small signal AC analysis.
- anta40 6y agoPerhaps think of it as Electronics Workbench/Multisim "clone".
- etimberg 6y agoI worked at National Instruments on multisim for 4 years. It's fully spice based, whereas this looks like just a digital logic simulator.
- retrac 6y agoSpice is primarily an analogue simulator. It can handle audio amplifiers just as well as simulating digital logic circuits. Digital, as the name implies, doesn't deal with the analogue at all, it's a graphical logic simulator. Step-based, fixed signal values like 1, 0, not connected, high-impedance. Think visual Verilog, except somewhat limited. There is some support in Digital for defining component behaviour in Verilog or VHDL. Once defined, you will get a graphic symbol you can put in your diagram, and all the wires will behave as specified in the code. It's also possible to translate a schematic in the software to Verilog or VHDL code. Because of that, I do think it would be a good stepping stone to learning more about logic and hardware description languages. I've recommended it before to people who want to learn the basics. But it's still new, has some limits, and I don't think it would scale well to a large project.
- anon_tor_12345 6y agogreat. thanks very much clearing that up for me.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThis is basically a rewritten Logisim clone which in some ways is cleaner. There is also Logisim-Evolution, which also supports VHDL/Verilog and FPGA export.
- pupdogg 6y agoThis reminds me, whatever happened to the hand drawn circuit simulation ink? If anyone recalls, that video went viral back in late 2000s
- eatonphil 6y agoThis looks great! I was disappointed when Logisim was discontinued but it's good to see there are a number of clones or forks of it now being developed.
- marcodiego 6y agoMe too. Logisim possibly needed some clean up or cleaned up rewrite.
- Robotbeat 6y agoYes, that's basically what this is. BUT, I've been using Logisim-Evolution, and it is very nice. An expansion of Logisim that, among other things, does VHDL/Verilog and supports a lot of FPGA boards.
- dschuetz 6y agoIs this version of logisim any way faster? If it's capable of fully simulating a CPU at 16 Mhz then I'm sold.
- ajfjrbfbf 6y agoYou can simulate simple CPUs at 100-200 kHz. Faster than Logisim but not in the MHz range.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoThe fastest open source general digital logic simulator I'm aware off is Verilator, but obviously the speed of simulation depends greatly on the design and whether you are also generating wave forms (for offline viewing)
- Donckele 6y agoDoes anyone know of a headless “simplistic” simulator that uses input config files to define wiring and then outputs the state after a “clock tick”?
- sasvari 6y agoBeen a while since I've been running this, but you can patch something together with GHDL [0] (or Xilinx's simulation suite (ISim)). Define your circuit with VHDL/Verilog, create a testbench, run the scripts and export to VCD, and then look at the waveforms with GTKwave [1] or your waveform viewer of choice. [0] http://ghdl.free.fr/ http://ghdl.free.fr/ [1] http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/ http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/
- Donckele 6y agoHey, thanks for the reply and I have checked out the links briefly. The programs seem pretty heavyweight to what I’m looking for.
- sasvari 6y agoNot really sure what you mean with heavyweight, but it is simplistic according to your requirement: write input config files (here: in VHDL) for the simulator (ghdl), and then view the output after x clock ticks (with gtkwave).
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"o Contains a library with the most commonly used 74xx series integrated circuits. [...] o Good performance: The example processor can be clocked at 120 kHz. [...] o A circuit can be exported to VHDL or Verilog. There is also direct support for the BASYS3 Board and the TinyFPGA BX board. See the documentation for details. The examples folder contains a variant of the example CPU, which runs on a BASYS3 board." PDS: Looks really nice!