- Ngspice
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Ngspice Written in C Available in English Type Electronic circuit simulation License BSD license (free software) Website ngspice.sf.net Ngspice is a mixed-level/mixed-signal circuit simulator born around 1999 as a "student project" in the Electronics Engineering Department of University of Roma "La Sapienza" with the integration of BSIMSOI model into Spice3f5. In the first years, a small community of motivated hobbyists and professional contributed to the ngspice project by providing bug fixes and in-house developed code.
Ngspice is based on three free software packages: Spice3f5, Cider1b1 and Xspice:
- SPICE is the most famous and used electronic circuit simulator.
- Cider is a mixed-level simulator that already includes SPICE 3f5 and adds a device simulator to it: DSIM. Cider couples the circuit level simulator to the device simulator to provide greater simulation accuracy (at the expense of greater simulation time). Critical devices can be described with technology parameters (numerical models) and non critical ones with the original SPICE's compact models.
- Xspice is an extension to SPICE 3 that provides code modeling support and simulation of digital components through an embedded event driven algorithm.
Ngspice is, anyway, more than the simple sum of the packages above, as many people contributed to the project with their experience, their bug fixes and their improvements giving ngspice the robustness lacking in the original design.
Status of Ngspice simulator
Ngspice implements three classes of analysis:
- Nonlinear DC analyses
- Nonlinear Transient analyses
- Linear AC analyses
Ngspice implements the usual circuits elements, like resistors, capacitors, inductors (single or mutual), transmission lines and a growing number of semiconductor devices like diodes, bipolar transistors, mosfets (both bulk and SOI), mesfets, jfet and HFET.
New models can be added to the simulator using:
- The Xspice codemodel interface. This is a C-code interface that helps the modeling process by simplifying the access to simulator's internal structure.
- ADMS verilog model compiler. This is a new (and under development) interface. ADMS is model compiler that generates C-code from Verilog-A description of the model.
- C-code models. Ngspice is an open source project. New models can be linked to the sources and compiled.
Ngspice supports parametric netlists (i.e. netlists can contain parameters and expressions). Parametric macromodels, often released by manufacturers, can be imported as-is into the simulator. The old Spice2 netlists containing polynomial sources are correctly parsed.
Ngspice is licensed under BSD license.
External links
Categories:- Free simulation software
- Electronic circuit simulators
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