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"MARTHA" RF/Microwave CAD Using APL -- Free!
On Dec 2, 6:22 pm, (Doug White) wrote:
"MARTHA" is a unique circuit analysis software package that was originally developed at MIT in the early 1970's. Rather than a "canned" analysis package that only performs pre-programmed circuit analysis operations, it is a circuit-description extension to the APL computer programming language. It will perform analysis of linear networks like other CAD packages, but by coupling it with APL, it can be used to perform custom analysis and synthesis of circuits that are difficult or impossible to do in other CAD environments. MARTHA was originally marketed as a mainframe time-share product. It was used at MIT for teaching circuit theory, and by engineers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to design RF & microwave circuits for radar and communications satellites. Lincoln Laboratory used the capabilities of MARTHA to create circuit synthesis programs (mostly for microstrip and LC filters), in addition to expanding the analysis capabilities of MARTHA. MARTHA never caught on as a commercial product, but it continued to thrive at Lincoln Lab even after competing PC products like Touchstone became available. MARTHA and the other Lincoln software were ported to the PC, and additional features (like better graphics) were added. All of the Lincoln software was cleaned up and documented to create LLAMA (Lincoln Laboratory Advanced MARTHA Applications), which is still in use today. MIT Prof. Paul Penfield (MARTHA's original author) and Doug White (prime mover behind the LLAMA effort) have obtained permission to release MARTHA, LLAMA and the associated manuals into the public domain. The initial release is set up to run using a free DOS-based APL interpreter. The APL section of the web site includes this software, along with installation instructions and documentation on using APL. Additional information and all of the necessary files are available at the web site: http://www.marthallama.org. MARTHA is NOT for everyone. It doesn't have fancy schematic capture or PCB layout features. It also requires learning at least a little about the APL computer language (which could be considered a worthwhile exercise in its own right). There is no canned installation routine that will magically get it all up & running on your computer, but there are procedures & batch files to try to make it as painless as possible. Doug White Thanks to you and to Prof. Penfield for your work in making these programs available to us. I'll set aside time to do a proper installation (the web pages make it sound like I'll need to pay attention to what I'm doing...). This is kind of a "blast from the past." I recall using MARTHA a few times back around 1972 on our APL terminal. We also used APL for exactly what your web pages say it's good for: quick development of what in Fortran of the day would have been ugly, since we had problem statements already in matrix form. Cheers, Tom |
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