Proteus Professional

About Proteus Professional

Proteus is unusual because the schematic is not just a drawing. Capture a circuit, press run, and the simulator solves it: analogue nodes with a SPICE engine underneath, digital sections in an event driven simulator, and the two working together on the same sheet. Probes and virtual instruments including an oscilloscope, logic analyser, signal generator and protocol analysers attach directly to the wires.

The part that changed how people teach and prototype embedded work is co-simulation. A compiled firmware image loads onto a simulated microcontroller and executes against the surrounding circuit, so an LCD updates, a motor driver responds and a serial link talks to a virtual terminal, all before any hardware exists. Breakpoints and single stepping work while the analogue side keeps solving around the processor.

PCB layout shares the same design database, so the netlist never has to be exported and reimported. Board outline, layer stackup, design rules, copper pours, differential pairs and length matching are all handled, and the autorouter takes the tedious sections while the critical ones stay manual. Output covers gerbers, drill files, pick and place and an assembly drawing set.

The 3D viewer renders the finished board with component models so mechanical clearance can be checked before a fabrication order, and the board exports to a mechanical CAD format for fitting into an enclosure. For a small team the whole path from an idea on a schematic sheet to a manufacturing package sits inside one application.

What is included in this build

• Schematic capture with a very large component library and hierarchical sheets
• Mixed mode simulation combining a SPICE analogue engine with an event driven digital one
• Microcontroller co-simulation running compiled firmware against the surrounding circuit
• Virtual instruments including oscilloscope, logic analyser and protocol analysers
• PCB layout sharing one design database with the schematic, so no netlist export is needed
• Design rule checking, copper pours, differential pairs and length matching
• Autorouter for bulk routing with manual control kept on critical nets
• 3D board viewer with component models and mechanical CAD export

Changed in version 9.1 SP2

• Additional microcontroller families added to the co-simulation set
• Faster simulation convergence on circuits with switching supplies
• Improved autorouter results on dense multi-layer boards
• Component library expanded with newer packages and footprints
• 3D viewer performance raised on boards with high component counts

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Disable real-time protection until the installation has completed.
2. Extract the archive to a short path with no spaces in the folder name.
3. Run setup as administrator and select the Professional feature set.
4. Install the bundled runtime components when the installer offers them.
5. Reboot once, then set the library and project folders before starting work.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title