TkGate 1.8.5 review

TkGate is a event driven digital circuit simulator with a tcl/tk-based graphical editor

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1469K Developer: Jeffery Hansen

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TkGate is a event driven digital circuit simulator with a tcl/tk-based graphical editor. TkGate supports a wide range of primitive circuit elements as well as user-defined modules for hierarchical design.

The distribution comes with a number of tutorial and example circuits which can be loaded through the "Help" menu. The example circuits include a simple CPU, programmed to run the Animals game. TkGate is free software provided with source code under the Gnu Public License.

Here are some key features of "TkGate":
Graphical circuit design

Hierarchical design through user defined modules.
Easy to use point-and-click user interface.
Create hyperlinks to move about in circuit or load other files.
Multi-lingual interface (Catalan, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Welsh)
Verilog-like save file format.

Logic simulation

Control through the GUI or through script files.
Suitable for simulation at transistor, gate or register transfer level.
Six valued logic model including 0, 1, floating, unknown, "low" and "high".
Support for custom delay models.
Graphical display of simulation results.
Breakpoints, single-step and clock-step simulator control.
Static critical path analysis.

Primitive circuit elements include:

Basic gates (AND, OR, etc.)
Switch-level NMOS and PMOS transistors
Tristate buffers
Alu components (Adders, shifters, multipliers)
Memory elements (Registers, RAMs, ROMs)
An interactive "tty" element allows design of circuits that can interact with the user.

Support tools include a microcode/macrocode compiler to assist in creating large projects such as microprocessor designs.