Essential Software for Electrical Engineering Students: MATLAB, LTspice, AutoCAD, PSpice

Which software programs should I become familiar with as I study to be an electrical engineer?
I am student at university (semester 3)

I would suggest that you become familiar with a spice tool like "LTSpice":http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/

These are the categories of tools that I have used or use:

* Schematic and PCB Layout Tool (PCAD and Altium)
* Spice Simulation tools(Genesys, Microcap, LTSpice)
* FPGA Development and synthesis tools (Altera's Quartus and Xilinx ISE Design Suite)
* Micro-controller development tools
* Matlab is a mathmatics tool I have come to rely on

Software tools for what purpose? As Cody pointed out, there are several completely different areas where software tools are applied to EE.

You will be using some schematic, layout, and routing package. At this stage (college) it doesn't matter which one you get familiar with. The point is to get experience with this kind of tool in general. Your employer will dictate what tool to use in their company. There isn't one universal tool, so they will understand you may not have experience with the tool they use in particular. However, they will expect you to undestand the concepts and have reasonable experience with one of these tools.

Your university may have a site license for one or more of these tools. If so, get familiar with whichever one that is. If not, I would look into Eagle from Cadsoft (now part of Newark). There are free entry level versions and educational discounts. This is a good package to know outside whatever your employer requires because it is quite capable but much lower cost than the other full featured ones. If you do things on your own where you can't afford $10K and more for a software tool, this will be a good answer.

As for simulation tools, I don't know since I don't really use them. Nowadays it will be useful to have experience with one. The most common ones I hear of are Spice derivatives. It would be a good idea to get familiar with that. I've heard Linear Technologies makes a version available for free, but that's only heresay.

At the risk of sounding like a old fart, I think the best circuit analisys tools are you brain and a calculator. There are certainly instances where a simulator is useful, especially when the lumped approximation doesn't hold like with RF. However, simulators also have a downside, which is that they make it too easy to just get a answer without the all-important understanding you should have.

All good EEs I've run into can look at a schematic and "see" the voltages pushing and the currents flowing. This is also the essential basis for starting with requirements and synthesizing the circuit. Once you think of circuits that way, you'll find just about anything can be solved in a minute or two with a calculator. I do mostly microcontroller and non-RF analog circuits, and I can usually analize a circuit or determine part values in a new circuit before the knee-jerkers get done entering the parameters into a simulator.

Another important tool is to be proficient in some programming language. You absolutely need to be able to write quick one-off programs for whatever comes up. This doesn't work if you think of writing a short program as a hassle or that it requires looking up stuff about the language. This tool only works if it's ready at your fingertips. It doesn't matter what language it is, as long as it's something you get comfortable and proficient at.

I should point out that I don't mean this for analysing circuits, although that comes up in rare cases. It may be something as mundane as grabbing a certain section of data from a bunch of files in a directory and plotting it, creating scripts for inputs into other programs, or to perform some calculation that needs to be done 50 times for a particular job.

Software I used during my education included Matlab, ADS (Advanced Design System), Excel,SPICE programs such as PSPICE, and micro-controller programming software such as Arduino.

Reading Olin post reminded me of the importance of a good text editor. I use "jEdit":http://www.jedit.org/ and it is free. There are many editors out there, but finding a powerful editor can make life easier.

I'm a masters of electrical engineering student who is just entering the full time job market, but I have had a few internships and a few research experiences, and these are my two cents:

as Olin said, there are certain things that all EE should know how to do, analyze circuits, and in todays world, know at least one computer language. Based on what kind of electrical engineering work you want to do, there will be different secondary skills you should work towards developing. MATLAB is great for all kinds of numerical analysis is something I use on a daily basis. But if you want to get into DSP, you might want to check out something like Verilog for programing FPGAs. If you are more interested in hardware or circuit analysis, the LTspice (free) or Pspice (not free), would be something to get familiar with. I hear the Comsol has a pretty good RF module, if you want to go that direction.

John,

It might just be the way my school has things set up, but I have a student version of PSPICE that cost me nothing.

Hi John,

I am curious which vendor of PSPICE they provide you at school. When I was in school we had access to a version of OrCAD. It was limited to something like 15 components though.

I want to add Electrical Auto-Cad in the above list for Electrical wiring installation design.

Hello! To organize the work of an electrician, you can use https://www.managemart.com/electrician-services. I use it myself. This should simplify your learning.