As an electronics engineer, I find a very limited number of electronic circuit simulators available in the market. SPICE is the industry standard language for circuit simulations, but for circuits with limited complexities. If the design consists of programmable devices like microcontrollers, microprocessors, digital signal processors, FPGAs, CPLDs etc. , SPICE is not the solution.
IDEs like CCS, MPLAB, KEIL, XILINX ISE, QUARTUS II, etc. are available in the market for programmable devices but tools which can simulate the designs involving these devices plus other components are very few.
Multisim, from National Instruments, is a good tool to simulate the designs involving microcontrollers as well as other components like transistors, resistors, etc. The tool has a very powerful SPICE simulator with a rich library of electronic components. Also, it has a facility to add new components using SPICE models available from device manufacturer's website. The tool has features like time domain analysis, frequency domain analysis, monte-carlo analysis among others. It can be integrated with system level tool LabVIEW. The only limitation of the tool is it has a very limited number of microcontroller devices.
Proteus from Labcenter Electronics is another tool which has all these facilities of multisim but the background simulator is not as good as multisim.
IDEs like CCS, MPLAB, KEIL, XILINX ISE, QUARTUS II, etc. are available in the market for programmable devices but tools which can simulate the designs involving these devices plus other components are very few.
Multisim, from National Instruments, is a good tool to simulate the designs involving microcontrollers as well as other components like transistors, resistors, etc. The tool has a very powerful SPICE simulator with a rich library of electronic components. Also, it has a facility to add new components using SPICE models available from device manufacturer's website. The tool has features like time domain analysis, frequency domain analysis, monte-carlo analysis among others. It can be integrated with system level tool LabVIEW. The only limitation of the tool is it has a very limited number of microcontroller devices.
Proteus from Labcenter Electronics is another tool which has all these facilities of multisim but the background simulator is not as good as multisim.