QUCSstudio now has EM simulator

[stair]

For those that are interested RF design you may be interested to know that the most recent public release of QUCSstudio now has basic microstrip EM simulation based on openEMS

You can create the layout using microstrip elements either in the schematic editor or direct in the layout and then simulate to give S parameters. The layout can be exported to gds, png, jpg or bmp which I guess could then be used in KiCAD as the basis for a custom footprint

Home - QucsStudio

Not open source but free and very useful none the less

[pointhi]

QucsStudio is quite a weird project. The original project, Qucs is GPLv2+, but QucsStudio is not an open source project anymore, more like Freeware.

The EM simulation is based on GLMoM , Puma-EM or Scuff-EM according to their website, not openEMS. All of them didn’t received updates in the last years, to my knowledge.

To get a list of FEM packages which can be used for EM simulation, I have a wiki page: https://gitlab.com/pointhi/kicad/-/wikis/SI-and-PI

[stair]

Sadly the original QUCS project appears to be dead in all but name, it promised great things. I don’t know what prompted the author of QucsStudio to rewrite the simulation engine and choose not to open source it but it is his choice, none the less QucsStudio is heading towards what QUCS might have been.

BTW, the EM simulation is definitely openEMS, make sure to look on the new web site linked above. Granted, there is no shortage of packages that can do the job but I am not aware of any other low cost or open source solution with the ease of QucsStudio and that is the point.

[michal777]

I can see there is some recent activity in QUCS (e.g some major refactoring here: https://github.com/Qucs/qucs/pull/898).
Also there is a relatively new tool to integrate QUCS with OpenEMS EM simulator: https://github.com/thomaslepoix/Qucs-RFlayout/blob/master/doc/tutorials/openems.md

QUCS works fine for me, great thing to play with RF. I tried Qucs-RFlayout, for simple use cases it looks better than writing scripts for OpenEMS but probably it’s not helpful for structures that can’t be easily autogenerated from schematic.