Simulators Comparison
My personal experience and preferences about the mentioned simulators follow:
- Eldo - Great simulator (my favorite). Didn't give me any "convergence problem", yet. Awful wave viewer - "Xelga" - shame. Supports Philips models, though.
- HSpice - Very good simulator. A bit slower than expected, but with fast CPU it shouldn't be a problem. A bit better wave viewer - AvantWave. It's hard to get support from Avant! if you aren't a "big fish". I had some problems (solvable) with the "convergence". Also supports Philips models.
- PSpice (OrCAD) - Good simulator. Haven't used it recently, so it could have improved. It has my favorite wave viewer, though - "Probe". Very nice integrated environment (good for beginners). Give some "convergence problems" when relatively big circuits with digital logic and lots of feedbacks are used.
- SmartSpice - Well, really faster than the others, but I still have some doubts about the accuracy. And a funny name - like all the other simulators are "dump".
- T-Spice - I just started using it, but so far - no problems.
As you can see I didn't discuss the friendliness of each product. I assume that it shouldn't be an issue, as long you have a decent Schematic Capture and you know the Spice syntax well. My favorite Schematic Capture is ViewDraw, though. Then comes PSpice Schematics.
I didn't discuss the Cadence's products, as well. I consider them way too expensive, unfriendly, clumsy and not worthy for this forum.
I didn't compare the speed, as well. It depends so much on the platform (Sun, PC), the OS (Solaris, Linux, WinXX), the CPU, memory, etc. The best scenario will be to run all of them at the same machine, which I did not do it.
Good Luck.