Pen almost any piece of electronic equipment these days and chances are you’ll see just one or two ICs, often with hundreds of pins and only a handful of discrete components. Usually, the components are so small it’s difficult if not impossible to identify exactly what they are (resistor, capacitor, inductor, or what?).

It’s easy to imagine the control and precision needed to assemble these miniature PC boards. What about the design of the ICs themselves though – how the heck do they design, prototype and test the circuits inside a 300-pin "mega-chip"? And how do they make sure the ICs will work in a real circuit before committing them to manufacture?

Computer software, of course, is the big answer. Ingenious software developers have been able to create virtual development environments which allow the entire design and test phase to be carried out without a piece of hardware in sight.

Bringing the design elements together in this way has less obvious advantages, too. For example, hardware engineers can work at a level of abstraction above the underlying logic elements, greatly increasing design speed.

In this review, we look at Multisim V6 from Electronics Workbench, a collection of state-of-the-art circuit design and simulation tools.

Multisim includes all the tools necessary to take a design from inception to finished project and as such, a detailed review would have to cover an enormous amount of ground. We cannot hope to do justice to all aspects of the product in this short review, so we’ve settled on describing some of the main features instead.

Schematic capture

Fig.1: schematic entry and editing is a straightforward process. Fonts, colours and label positions can easily be changed for a more professional look.

Designs are drawn in a familiar Windows environment using the Schematic Capture module.

As with all other schematic capture programs, Multisim has a database of the most commonly used components (more than 16,000 in the Power-Pro edition) that can be placed and wired immediately. However, Multisim’s database is perhaps unique in that every component has a simulation model attached to it (we look at simulation a little further on).

If a part that you want isn’t in the database, Multisim includes a Symbol Editor that allows you to create your own, either from scratch or based on an existing component (or "symbol").