[mindwaves]

Hi,

I looked around and I came to the conclusion that there is a big lack of Electrical/Computer engineering native software for the Macintosh platform. I mean we have a ton of developer tools for the Computer Science department, tons of software for the web developer, from what I heard, some nice CAD apps for the Civil engineering department, but for the ECE department, I think there is a total lack of software. What I want is a native version of PSpice, HSpice, some VHDL application, and some VLSI layout like Magic. I know that there are a lot of Unix apps out there, but in therms of feature comparison, they are lacking in many ways. What I want is native applications and to me, they are sorely lacking. But for now, I guess that I will have to contend compliling my own *nix apps.

[DeathMan]

A lot of the techier Mac users are really hoping for a more integrated X11 that can seem to run these apps native with aqua windows and everything. Wouldn't that be cool, if X11 was just built in and could run those apps just like Cocoa or Carbon? Though that could cause consistency problems that we mac users are prone to complain about.

That would be like a million new native apps for the Mac.

[bmedina]

Pretty much every app I've needed for my EE undergrad degree runs on UNIX workstations into which you ssh and run in X11. The big exceptions are PSpice and Matlab. Matlab is now available for OS X, and for heavy lifting spice simulation, you'd want to use HSpice anyway. It's not as bad as you make it sound.

All the "real" software (i.e. stuff like Cadence's) for EE costs many thousands of dollars, so not having a single-user OS X version isn't a big loss.

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by mindwaves:
Hi,

I looked around and I came to the conclusion that there is a big lack of Electrical/Computer engineering native software for the Macintosh platform. I mean we have a ton of developer tools for the Computer Science department, tons of software for the web developer, from what I heard, some nice CAD apps for the Civil engineering department, but for the ECE department, I think there is a total lack of software. What I want is a native version of PSpice, HSpice, some VHDL application, and some VLSI layout like Magic. I know that there are a lot of Unix apps out there, but in therms of feature comparison, they are lacking in many ways. What I want is native applications and to me, they are sorely lacking. But for now, I guess that I will have to contend compliling my own *nix apps.

Sounds like you are going thru what I went 6-7 years ago

Unfortunately there aren't that many for Mac around. However, I did mange found a little bit of software that might be useful on a Mac (lucky I still kept bookmarks that I had in University times 708 years ago ):

1. Alliance http://www-asim.lip6.fr/alliance/
Free VLSI tools (GNU licence)
including VHDL editor and compiler. I didn't try it because Mac OS X didn't exist when I did my University degree, and I didn't have time to compile it on MkLinux (too busy to get my VLSI design working in Uni computer labs )
I would say get this a try.


2. Electric http://www.fsf.org/software/electric/electric.html
Also free (GNU licence)
Didn't try it myself, but it does look promising

Magic isn't really available on Mac. However, one of my uni friends was managed to get Magic source compiled under LinuxPPC (that was about 4-5 years ago). I guess with Mac OS X and X11 you should be able to compile it yourself with some compile switch changes (assume you are not behind with your chip design already).

In terms of commerical tools, the big three (Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor) are mainly concentrate on Solaris, HP and WinNT, but for the last 2-3 years there are doing a fair bit on Linux. No, no Mac OS X here. They mainly develop platform based on customers' needs. Mist customers use Solaris or WinNT or Linux (on Intel). Also, IBM generally use their own tools on AIX, and Motorola generally use Solaris or HP or a bit of WinNT to develop their chips, and they never use Mac to devleop chip (which is very sad )

Well, I might be able to find out more chip design tools available Mac if you want to, just reply here.

You just brought up my good and bad memories of my university years...

[veryniceguy2002]

BTW, there is a thread in MacSlash talks about what you are looking for. There's something web site mentioned which has MacOS X version of chip design tools (I haven't check it out myself).

Also, in the Magic mailing list there are several threads regarding compiling Magic under Mac OS X 10.2. (Do a find with keyword "Mac") I think that would be a good start.

Let us know here if you have any success on any of the stuff above.

[Angus_D]

Fink has some ports of electrical engineering tools (oregano springs to mind).

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by mindwaves:
Hi,
What I want is a native version of PSpice, HSpice, some VHDL application, and some VLSI layout like Magic.

There was a freeware spice for Mac (and I mean for System 7 etc, not OS X), but I guess you might be able to compile a command line spice for OS X from the source. (I hope you don't need GUI like stuff in PSpice).

HSpice is purely commercial app. I have not aware of any shareware/freeware HSpice like tool available on any platform. Those tools are generally pretty expensive (at least US$10k+ per year per seat), and I doubt you could find an HSpice for Mac at all.

BTW, it's quite strange that you would be using VHDL in US... I thought that VHDL is used more for Europeans, and AMericans generally use Verilog instead??

[chris01]

Originally posted by veryniceguy2002:
There was a freeware spice for Mac (and I mean for System 7 etc, not OS X), but I guess you might be able to compile a command line spice for OS X from the source. (I hope you don't need GUI like stuff in PSpice).

spice is available in Fink. Just install Fink, enable the unstable tree and do

fink install spice

That's it.

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by veryniceguy2002:
BTW, it's quite strange that you would be using VHDL in US... I thought that VHDL is used more for Europeans, and AMericans generally use Verilog instead??

Really? When I was in college (GT '92 - '96), VHDL was all they taught for VLSI design.

[dreilly1]

Originally posted by veryniceguy2002:
BTW, it's quite strange that you would be using VHDL in US... I thought that VHDL is used more for Europeans, and AMericans generally use Verilog instead??

There are lots of people who use VHDL in the U.S., even though VHDL is dying.... I believe that the US Government is still very interested in VHDL, and companies and universities that work with the Government will likely have a lot of VHDL expertise. I do digital design, and we use both, although we are starting to do more projects where the RTL design is in VHDL and the gate-level netlist is in Verilog, using both languages where they are strongest...

As for Mac EDA tools, I'm afraid we won't see many commercial ones until the perception builds that the Mac's speed problems are over. It took us a long time to transition away from our Sun boxes, and now we have computing farms that are roughly 50% Solaris and 50% Linux. We use the linux boxes because they are twice as fast as the Solaris servers, at a fifth of the cost. Now, most companies that were thinking of developing for NT are developing for Linux instead. Apple would have to beat that price/performance ratio to get tool companies to support OS X!

[veryniceguy2002]

Originally posted by chris01:
spice is available in Fink. Just install Fink, enable the unstable tree and do

fink install spice

That's it.

Just for the records, I saw this app from VersionTracker:

MI-SUGAR ("my sugar")
This application is a graphical interface to the well-known circuit simulator SPICE. This bundle also includes a free port of Berkeley SPICE 3f5. Please send me feedback after downloading the software and having played with it.

http://homepage.mac.com/berkozer/macinitiative/

Perhaps we should encourage those people to develop more Circuit Design tools by donating money to them?