User:Lewis41/FEL/Fedora-Electronic-Lab

Aborted: Take a look at the manual pages already available!

Abstract
This guide would be a low level intro to the tools offered by the FEL, targeted for an audience that frequent a high school, a professional school, or Technical schools in Electrics (e.g. Istituti professionali in Italy). As there are already many good manuals online that explain the various tools, the goal is to explain in a compendium what do the various tools, how to use them using the GUI or the terminal command, when it can offer more configuration/setting options, with simple examples. It is organized in two parts: a first section dedicated to analog/digital electronic with discrete components, the other to integrated electronic (VLSI and Nano). I'll focuse principally on the first part.

FEL: what is and why use it (to do)
FEL is a suite of powerful tools primary desigend to offer to micro-electronic engineers the necessary software to design, simulate and test integrated circuits. View About FEL. They are constantly developed and improved by reserchears at University centers an volunteers around the world.

Get the Electronics Applications
The Electronics Applications of FEL are available as a Spin (Live DVD/USB) or from Fedora repositories. A Fedora Spin is an alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations. You can get a FEL-Spin from the downloads page, where you find also informations on how to use the Spin. If necessary, view also the handy How to use the Fedora live image, doc.

Alternatively, you can install the applications on your system, as usual using  in a terminal, or via the PackageKit GUI. To install the entire suite of applications run yum groupinstall 'Electronic Lab' as root user, or select the Electronic Lab group package in the PackageKit. To install a sub-set of applications run yum install ... as root, where ... are the electronic application packages you want install.

The Electronic Lab has the following applications, placed under Applications --> Electronics:
 * Analog/Mixed Signal Design
 * Electric VLSI
 * LVS netlist comparator
 * Magic VLSI Layout
 * Toped
 * XCircuit Schematic
 * Circuit and PCB Design
 * gEDA Attribute Editor
 * gEDA Schematic Editor
 * Gerbv Gerber File Viewer
 * PCB Designer
 * Circuit Simulation
 * Analog Waveform viewer
 * Spice Simulation Frontend
 * Digital IC Design
 * Alliance: FSM Viewer
 * Alliance: Graphic Graph Viewer
 * Alliance: Layout Editor
 * Alliance: Layout Viewer
 * Alliance: Patterns Viewer
 * Alliance: Petri Nets Viewer
 * Alliance: Schematic Viewer
 * Digital circuit simulator
 * Waveform viewer
 * Embedded Design
 * GNUSim8085
 * GSim85
 * KTechlab
 * MCU 8051IDE
 * PiKLoops
 * Coverage Analyze
 * Eeschema
 * gResistor
 * KiCad
 * LabPlot
 * Linsmith
 * Pcbnew
 * Piklab
 * QElectroTech
 * Qucs: is a circuit simulator with graphical user interface. It is able to perform many different kinds of simulation: DC, AC, TRANSIENT, DIGITAL, S-PARAMETER, HARMONIC BALANCE, PARAMETER SWEEP and OPTIMIZATION.
 * sk2py

Intro
Analog circuits are electric circuits whose signals (current and tension) are continous in time and amplitude domains, in contrapposition to digital signals, where they are discontinous in both domains. More generally analog signals are continous functions of time. An analog signal could be, for example the music that comes from a loudspeaker or the voice that you ear from a person. The signal describes the evolution in time of a certain physical quantity, that in electrical case, colud be the amplitude or intensity of a current/tension in a branch of a circuit, the power delivered to a load, ecc.

The theory of analog circuits helps us to eleborate analog signals, such as filtering a signal from unwanted noise or some its frequencies; amplfying it, etc.

The tools available here otherwise help us to verify our expected results, and improve our global understanding. With the appropriate plot we can have a visual representation of our analysis.

The primary elements used in analog circuits are passive elements: Resistor, Capacitor, Inductance and active elements: Diode, Transistor (BJT, FETs), Operational Amplifier.