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by ilaksh 1698 days ago
Is there a tool that can simulate some types of Kicad outputs? I mean something like do a PCB design for a simple circuit and then "run" or debug it in some way.
2 comments

For analog electrical simulation there's SPICE. Kicad has a spice tool built in, but I haven't used it. It has some improvements in Kicad 6. I use LTSpice.

For digital or systems simulation there's Renode. You have to recreate the system in Renode,there's no Kicad integration.

Maybe with the new s-expressions it will be more feasible for someone to create an importer for Renode. Assuming enough annotations or whatever.
I would honestly manually recreate my simple PCB designs in Falstad's simulator[1] and use judgment to decide whether further thermal or high-freq analysis is necessary.

I haven't looked in a few years, but you'll likely be hard-pressed to find an open source simulator that will give you analog, pure digital, "real" digital (logic with slew/noise/nonlinearities), electromagnetic, and thermal simulations plus usability.

ANSYS is a well-established professional simulation suite and doesn't even really meet the usability threshold, in my opinion.

[1] https://www.falstad.com/circuit/