I regularly find myself with a SPICE model for a MOSFET but a TINA-TI model for a gate driver and then wasting minutes and hours trying to simulate the two together. There's a hodge podge of different component libraries out there. All of them much the same with horrible appearances, bizzare keyboard shortcuts that differ from any other software, dated looking user interfaces and symbols. I've used LT Spice, P Spice, TINA TI and Simetrix. Then we come to SPICE simulation which in my humble opinion are universally horrible to use. I pay for the Microsoft Office suite which I find very good, likewise I've used the free LibreOffice suite in the past and been impressed. I know a lot of people love Google Sketch-up, I love Autodesk Inventor. KiCAD is one of the best open-source programs I've ever used, Altium Designer is just beautiful.

It strikes me that all of these offer some fantastic open source options and some really excellent paid-for options. I would begin by saying this is not meant to cause offense or to slag off anyone or anything in particular.Ĭonsider the software we need as electrical or electronics engineers, such as control simulation, PCB design, mechanical design, e-mail, word processing, thermal design, magnetic design, software IDEs, schematic capture and diagram creation.

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