Petroleum Engineer Lost in the Electrical Engineer World

[Petro Dawg]

I decided for my last semester of college I would take an Electrical Engineering course relating to the Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VDHL design as a technical elective. The very expensive text book recommends working the examples using Altera, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Synplicity, or Xilinx. The book includes a copy of Altera's Quartus II CAD system (which I assume is why the book was so expensive). Of course, the program only runs on Windows; which I would rather avoid if possible.

I downloaded Qucs from the Ubuntu software center which seems to be a circuit CAD program which uses VDHL. My problem is that I have never touched software like this, and have never written a single line of code using VDHL, so I wouldn't know a good program from an awful one. Is Qucs good for learning simple circuit design? Or is there a better opensource alternative to Altera for Ubuntu? Or am I better off just firing up WinXP and installing the included Altera?

I like to use the Linux alternative when ever possible, but I don't want to end up beating my head against the wall trying to figure out how to do something in the Linux alternative that is much more simply achieved in Altera.

So if you have had any experience with these programs, I'd like to get your opinion.

[lads]

Hi Petro, this probably isn't the best section of the Forum to ask this kind of question. I have no experience with this sort of software but there are some clues you could follow. At the Software Centre if you do a search for "circuit" and rank the results by "Top Rated" you'll see that there is another interesting option: KiCad. Click on the "More Info" button for both KiCad and Qucs and read closely the reviews.

For more specific questions you better contact the specific community of the software.

Happy exploring.