EDA tools

I am on the lookout for EDA tools, simple circuit simulation ones, that can be used in a classroom, to instruct first year engineering students. Something like a GPL'ed Electronics Workbench would do just fine. Since the tool would be used in a Lab Setup, and students would be having only a few hours to get familiar with (and not an entire course), it should have a GUI (must), and it should be intuitive. If you know of one, post a comment here.

Initial search on source-forge yields three possibilities.

The first one is DigitalSimulator, which looks pretty stable (& bloated too) and should suffice for digital experiments. Only thing that surprises me is its Java based, yet glued to MS Windows platfroms.

Then there is Qucs (Qt universal circuit simulator) , thats still in its 0.04 version, and would require some improvements before its ready for prime-time, but shows promise. This one of course, is more oriented towards electrical components (no digital circuits, no transistors/diodes either)

And another one is tkgate (event driven digital circuit simulator with a tcl/tk-based graphical editor). I am yet to explore it and find out what an ED-DCS is. Time to get back to work !!