Questions about software used in the industry

[Sypher]

I was wondering what actual software is used by professionals? For example, in my Computer Engineering lab we are using Quartus software to simulate our designs. Is this software actually used (I don't like it very much)? Other software we use: Altium PCB designer and Candace PSpice.

Is this software actually used by professionals? I'm guessing MatLab is used a lot? What else?

[olsenn]

Quartus would be for Alterra FPGA's I would imagine. To be honest there really isn't so much of a standard practice amongst companies for which software they choose; both as an individual and when working with a company, the software you use should be chosen to match the specific task you are working on. For PCB design, Altium is quite feature rich (and expensive) and can be found at a lot of places. MATLAB, Mathematica, LabView, Eclipse, Multisim, PSPICE, AIR Workstation... are all popular pieces of software.

Undoubtably, the only pice of software that darned near ALL companies buy is Microsoft Office. Everything else is decided by you and your team mates and relayed off to your purchasing department for approval.

[T4P]

Some *cough* companies use Mentor Graphics and it's the worst CAD package designer i have used .
It's so expensive and yet so much bovine byproduct .
Stay away from Mentor as much as you can !

[EEVblog]

Yes, all of those packages are used by professionals.
But there is no standard, everyone uses what they like and are used too, or what the company standard is etc.

Dave.

[free_electron]

It depends what you do and at what scale.

'Hardcore' software :

Mentor DxDesigner/ Boardstation , Cadence Allegro  ( PCB design )
Agilent ADS , Eldo , Analog Artist  ( spice simulation )
Hyperlinx, AST studio ( field solvers for EMC )
Flomerics ( Thermal modeling )
Synopsys , SpecMan , Modelsim  ( HDL synthesis / verification )

High end software :
Zuken CB5000 , Altium (PCb Design ) , OrCad, Mentor PADS
Quartus (paying version), ISE (paying version), Modelsim Lite , Veritak, Aldec ( HDL synthesis )

the difference between modelsim and modelsim lite is that they artificially slow down the simulator and things like compute farm runs are disabled. you can do the same thing but just much much slower. things that take the paid version 1 second to run take half an hour on the free version ... then again... by the time you need half an hour runs you're playing with thousand $ FPGA's.... or trying to do timing closure on an asic ... and then you have money to spend on tools anyway.

Hard-core is not bought but leased. every year you need to fork over more money or it stops running.... My division of the company i work for  spends a couple million $ every year on Cadence licences...

[ftransform]