Visual logic designer + simulation

Question

in university we had our internal program called HLCCAD - it was very nice, and now I need to do design & debug some digital circuit and wondering what is current state of art software for that kind of things (price is out of consideration for now)?

I.e. I want to visually place components, and then simulate it.

Manually writing VHDL code & looking at simulation traceouts of specific nodes is not enough.

Any suggestions?

Update: Found Logisim - this is exactly what is needed. Are there any commercial alternatives with more horsepower?

Answer 1

I've heard good from Qucs (which has some basic digital logic, including VHDL apparently) and tkgate, which is an event driven logic simulator. Both are free open source software.

Answer 2

Both Xilinx and Altera provide their development environments for free. They are meant for designing the logic for placing on FPGA's and CPLD's, but you can simply use them in simulation mode. They let you place items on a schematic view like the above, and when you need more advanced components that are not built in, you can write their logic in VHDL.