[Laplace]

Hi all, I'm in college studying Electrical Engineering and I am making the switch to a Mac soon. I was wondering if there were any other EE guys/gals out there who could help me with some App issues that I might potentially have with a Mac, such as Altera Max Plus, PSPICE, etc.

I have looked for some Mac apps of these, but I haven't come up with anything productive. Does any have any recommendations?

I guess i'm looking for some reassurance before I plunk down 2K on a Mac.

Laplace

[dreilly1]

You're probably out of luck. It's been a while since I was in school, but even back then the only Mac Pspice program available was old, (I mean system 7.1 old) and a cursory google search doesn't yield anything newer! And I know for a fact that most EDA vendors don't support PPC platforms, although they are starting to support Linux. MaxPlusII is old software to begin with, that's why Altera gives it away!

But I wouldn't give up hope just yet.

- All these software tools are available on Unix systems, and I guarantee that your school has some Unix servers on campus. It's really just a matter of whether they've bothered to install the apps you need. It's not as hard as it used to be to be perpetually conencted to a server to get your work done.
(Remember that Macs have X11 support out of the box, you could run the app on the server and display it back to your Mac rather easily)

- Also, don't count out Virtual PC. Your designs probably won't be that computationally intensive, and may be tolerable on Virtual PC, expecially with a newer Mac. All these apps would probably run on Windows 98, which would probably be faster. Heck, you could even run Linux on VPC if you like.

- I know Altera has a web-based compilation tool, but I've never really used it.

- Finally, you could get an internship at a FPGA/ASIC design house with all these tools, and use their (professional) licenses!

Good luck!

[Laplace]

I'll have to check into the dedicated Unix servers with the applications on them. I am not sure myself whether or not my university does that.

Is there any books out there you could recommend for utilizing Unix for these types of applications in EE?

Thanks

[dreilly1]

Originally Posted by Laplace

I'll have to check into the dedicated Unix servers with the applications on them. I am not sure myself whether or not my university does that.

Is there any books out there you could recommend for utilizing Unix for these types of applications in EE?

Thanks

If you don't have any experience using Unix, any general book on using Unix can help you out. I had a book called "Unix for Students" or something like that, but that was over a decade ago.

Once you manage to invoke the application, though, the applications themselves look a lot like their Windows counterparts. In fact, some of them (MaxPlusII in particular) actually use the same GUI code through a windows-on-unix gui emulation layer like MainWin.

If you do end up displaying applications back to your Mac using X11, I would recommend getting a multi-button mouse. Most Unix systems have a three-button mouse, and the middle button tends to be very useful!

[osxrules]

Instead of spending 2k on a Mac that likely won't have the tools you need, why not buy a Mac Mini and a cheap PC? That way you get a decent Mac experience along with plenty of platform support with Windows and you will save about 1k.

When the Mactels come out, you should only need the one machine to run both systems but until then, I don't see how a single Mac will do what you need.

As good as Virtual PC is, it's not a PC and you might have driver issues if you are connecting electrical devices to do with your studies. For visualising stuff, it is slow because there is no hardware graphics support.

[mindwaves]

I graduated with an EE using my Mac. Not quite sure what Altera is (too lazy to look it up), but I'll assume it is VHDL related? For that, no one is rich enough to buy a license to run that. It usually only runs on UNIX servers anyway, so I usually just sshed into the school's server and ran it using X11. For PSpice, I used Virtual PC which is plenty fast enough to run most simulations. If not, I just used the computers at school and copied the data to my mac.