SPICE
Encyclopedia
SPICE is a general-purpose, open source analog electronic circuit
simulator
.
It is a powerful program that is used in integrated circuit
and board-level design to check the integrity of circuit design
s and to predict circuit
behavior.
integrated circuits before manufacture. Further, the high costs of photolithographic masks
and other manufacturing prerequisites make it essential to design the circuit to be as close to perfect as possible before the integrated circuit is first built. Simulating the circuit with SPICE is the industry-standard way to verify circuit operation at the transistor level before committing to manufacturing an integrated circuit.
Board-level circuit designs can often be breadboarded for testing. Even with a breadboard, some circuit properties may not be accurate compared to the final printed wiring board, such as parasitic resistances and capacitances. These parasitic components can often be estimated more accurately using SPICE simulation. Also, designers may want more information about the circuit than is available from a single mock-up. For instance, circuit performance is affected by component manufacturing tolerances. In these cases it is common to use SPICE to perform Monte Carlo
simulations of the effect of component variations on performance, a task which is impractical using calculations by hand for a circuit of any appreciable complexity.
Circuit simulation programs, of which SPICE and derivatives are the most prominent, take a text netlist
describing the circuit elements (transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc.) and their connections, and translate
this description into equations to be solved. The general equations produced are nonlinear differential algebraic equations which are solved using implicit integration methods
, Newton's method
and sparse matrix
techniques.
by Laurence Nagel with direction from his research advisor, Prof. Donald Pederson
. SPICE1 was largely a derivative of the CANCER program, which Nagel had worked on under Prof. Ronald Rohrer. CANCER was an acronym for "Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation," a hint to Berkeley's liberalism of 1960s: at these times many circuit simulators were developed under the United States Department of Defense
contracts that required the capability to evaluate the radiation hardness of a circuit. When Nagel's original advisor, Prof. Rohrer, left Berkeley, Prof. Pederson became his advisor. Pederson insisted that CANCER, a proprietary program, be rewritten enough that restrictions could be removed and the program could be put in the public domain.
SPICE1 was first presented at a conference in 1973. SPICE1 was coded in FORTRAN
and used nodal analysis
to construct the circuit equations. Nodal analysis has limitations in representing inductors, floating voltage sources and the various forms of controlled sources. SPICE1 had relatively few circuit elements available and used a fixed-timestep transient analysis. The real popularity of SPICE started with SPICE2 in 1975. SPICE2, also coded in FORTRAN, was a much-improved program with more circuit elements, variable timestep transient analysis using either the trapezoidal (second order Adams-Moulton method) or the Gear integration method (also known as BDF
), equation formulation via modified nodal analysis
(avoiding the limitations of nodal analysis), and an innovative FORTRAN-based memory allocation system developed by another graduate student, Ellis Cohen. The last FORTRAN version of SPICE was 2G.6 in 1983. SPICE3 was developed by Thomas Quarles (with A. Richard Newton
as advisor) in 1989. It is written in C
, uses the same netlist syntax, and added X Window System
plotting.
As an early open source
program, SPICE was widely distributed and used. Its ubiquity became such that "to SPICE a circuit" remains synonymous with circuit simulation. SPICE source code was from the beginning distributed by UC Berkeley for a nominal charge (to cover the cost of magnetic tape). The license originally included distribution restrictions for countries not considered friendly to the USA, but the source code is currently covered by the BSD license.
SPICE inspired and served as a basis for many other circuit simulation programs, in academia, in industry, and in commercial products. The first commercial version of SPICE was ISPICE, an interactive version on a timeshare service, National CSS
. The most prominent commercial versions of SPICE include HSPICE (originally commercialized by Shawn and Kim Hailey
of Meta Software, but now owned by Synopsys
) and PSPICE
(now owned by Cadence Design Systems
). The academic spinoffs of SPICE include XSPICE, developed at Georgia Tech
, which added mixed analog/digital "code models" for behavioral simulation, and Cider (previously CODECS, from UC Berkeley/Oregon State Univ.) which added semiconductor device simulation
. The integrated circuit industry adopted SPICE quickly, and until commercial versions became well developed many IC design houses had proprietary versions of SPICE. Today a few IC manufacturers, typically the larger companies, have groups continuing to develop SPICE-based circuit simulation programs. Among these are ADICE at Analog Devices
, LTspice at Linear Technology
, Mica at Freescale Semiconductor
, and TISPICE at Texas Instruments
. (Other companies maintain internal circuit simulators which are not directly based upon SPICE, among them PowerSpice at IBM
, Titan at Infineon Technologies
, Lynx at Intel Corporation
, and Pstar at NXP Semiconductor.) SPICE was named an IEEE Milestone in 2011.
Since SPICE is generally used to model nonlinear circuits, the small signal analyses are necessarily preceded by a quiescent point calculation at which the circuit is linearized. SPICE2 also contained code for other small-signal analyses: sensitivity analysis
, pole-zero analysis, and small-signal distortion
analysis. Analysis at various temperatures was done by automatically updating semiconductor model parameters for temperature, allowing the circuit to be simulated at temperature extremes.
Other circuit simulators have since added many analyses beyond those in SPICE2 to address changing industry requirements. Parametric sweeps were added to analyze circuit performance with changing manufacturing tolerances or operating conditions. Loop gain and stability calculations were added for analog circuits. Harmonic balance
or time-domain steady state analyses were added for RF and switched-capacitor circuit design. However, a public-domain circuit simulator containing the modern analyses and features needed to become a successor in popularity to SPICE has not yet emerged.
: three levels of MOSFET
model, a combined Ebers–Moll and Gummel-Poon bipolar model
, a JFET
model, and a model for a junction diode
. In addition, it had many other elements: resistors, capacitors, inductors (including coupling), independent voltage
and current source
s, ideal transmission line
s, and voltage and current controlled sources.
SPICE3 added more sophisticated MOSFET models, which were required due to advances in semiconductor technology.
In particular, the BSIM
family of models were added, which were also developed at UC Berkeley.
Commercial and industrial SPICE simulators have added many other device models as technology advanced and earlier models became inaccurate. To attempt standardization of these models so that a set of model parameters may be used in different simulators, an industry working group was formed, the Compact Model Council
, to choose, maintain and promote the use of standard models. The standard models today include BSIM3, BSIM4, BSIMSOI, PSP, HICUM, and MEXTRAM.
as input and produced line-printer listings as output, which fit with the computing environment in 1975. These listings were either columns of numbers corresponding to calculated outputs (typically voltages or currents), or line-printer character "plots"
. SPICE3 retained the netlist for circuit description, but allowed analyses to be controlled from a command-line interface similar to the C shell
. SPICE3 also added basic X-Window plotting, as UNIX
and engineering workstation
s became common.
Vendors and various free software projects have added schematic capture
front-ends to SPICE, allowing a schematic diagram of the circuit to be drawn and the netlist to be automatically generated. Also, graphical user interface
s were added for selecting the simulations to be done and manipulating the voltage and current output vectors. In addition, very capable graphing utilities have been added to see waveforms and graphs of parametric dependencies. Several free versions of these extended programs are available, some as introductory limited packages
, and some without restrictions
.
Analogue electronics
Analogue electronics are electronic systems with a continuously variable signal, in contrast to digital electronics where signals usually take only two different levels. The term "analogue" describes the proportional relationship between a signal and a voltage or current that represents the signal...
simulator
Electronic circuit simulation
Electronic circuit simulation uses mathematical models to replicate the behavior of an actual electronic device or circuit.Simulation software allows for modeling of circuit operation and is an invaluable analysis tool...
.
It is a powerful program that is used in integrated circuit
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
and board-level design to check the integrity of circuit design
Circuit design
The process of circuit design can cover systems ranging from complex electronic systems all the way down to the individual transistors within an integrated circuit...
s and to predict circuit
Electronic circuit
An electronic circuit is composed of individual electronic components, such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductors and diodes, connected by conductive wires or traces through which electric current can flow...
behavior.
Introduction
Unlike board-level designs composed of discrete parts, it is not practical to breadboardBreadboard
A breadboard is a construction base for prototyping of electronics. The term is commonly used to refer to solderless breadboard ....
integrated circuits before manufacture. Further, the high costs of photolithographic masks
Photomask
A photomask is an opaque plate with holes or transparencies that allow light to shine through in a defined pattern. They are commonly used in photolithography.-Overview:...
and other manufacturing prerequisites make it essential to design the circuit to be as close to perfect as possible before the integrated circuit is first built. Simulating the circuit with SPICE is the industry-standard way to verify circuit operation at the transistor level before committing to manufacturing an integrated circuit.
Board-level circuit designs can often be breadboarded for testing. Even with a breadboard, some circuit properties may not be accurate compared to the final printed wiring board, such as parasitic resistances and capacitances. These parasitic components can often be estimated more accurately using SPICE simulation. Also, designers may want more information about the circuit than is available from a single mock-up. For instance, circuit performance is affected by component manufacturing tolerances. In these cases it is common to use SPICE to perform Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo method
Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used in computer simulations of physical and mathematical systems...
simulations of the effect of component variations on performance, a task which is impractical using calculations by hand for a circuit of any appreciable complexity.
Circuit simulation programs, of which SPICE and derivatives are the most prominent, take a text netlist
Netlist
The word netlist can be used in several different contexts, but perhaps the most popular is in the field of electronic design. In this context, a "netlist" describes the connectivity of an electronic design....
describing the circuit elements (transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc.) and their connections, and translate
this description into equations to be solved. The general equations produced are nonlinear differential algebraic equations which are solved using implicit integration methods
Explicit and implicit methods
Explicit and implicit methods are approaches used in numerical analysis for obtaining numerical solutions of time-dependent ordinary and partial differential equations, as is required in computer simulations of physical processes....
, Newton's method
Newton's method
In numerical analysis, Newton's method , named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a method for finding successively better approximations to the roots of a real-valued function. The algorithm is first in the class of Householder's methods, succeeded by Halley's method...
and sparse matrix
Sparse matrix
In the subfield of numerical analysis, a sparse matrix is a matrix populated primarily with zeros . The term itself was coined by Harry M. Markowitz....
techniques.
Origins
SPICE was developed at the Electronics Research Laboratory of the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
by Laurence Nagel with direction from his research advisor, Prof. Donald Pederson
Donald Pederson
Donald O. Pederson was an American professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the designers of SPICE, the canonical integrated circuit simulator.- Biography :...
. SPICE1 was largely a derivative of the CANCER program, which Nagel had worked on under Prof. Ronald Rohrer. CANCER was an acronym for "Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation," a hint to Berkeley's liberalism of 1960s: at these times many circuit simulators were developed under the United States Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
contracts that required the capability to evaluate the radiation hardness of a circuit. When Nagel's original advisor, Prof. Rohrer, left Berkeley, Prof. Pederson became his advisor. Pederson insisted that CANCER, a proprietary program, be rewritten enough that restrictions could be removed and the program could be put in the public domain.
SPICE1 was first presented at a conference in 1973. SPICE1 was coded in FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
and used nodal analysis
Nodal analysis
In electric circuits analysis, nodal analysis, node-voltage analysis, or the branch current method is a method of determining the voltage between "nodes" in an electrical circuit in terms of the branch currents.In analyzing a circuit using Kirchhoff's circuit laws, one can either do nodal...
to construct the circuit equations. Nodal analysis has limitations in representing inductors, floating voltage sources and the various forms of controlled sources. SPICE1 had relatively few circuit elements available and used a fixed-timestep transient analysis. The real popularity of SPICE started with SPICE2 in 1975. SPICE2, also coded in FORTRAN, was a much-improved program with more circuit elements, variable timestep transient analysis using either the trapezoidal (second order Adams-Moulton method) or the Gear integration method (also known as BDF
Backward differentiation formula
The backward differentiation formula is a family of implicit methods for the numerical integration of ordinary differential equations. They are linear multistep methods that, for a given function and time, approximate the derivative of that function using information from already computed times,...
), equation formulation via modified nodal analysis
Modified nodal analysis
In Electrical Engineering Modified Nodal Analysis or MNA is an extension of nodal analysis which not only determines the circuit's node voltages , but also some branch currents. Modified nodal analysis was developed as a formalism to mitigate the difficulty of representing voltage-defined...
(avoiding the limitations of nodal analysis), and an innovative FORTRAN-based memory allocation system developed by another graduate student, Ellis Cohen. The last FORTRAN version of SPICE was 2G.6 in 1983. SPICE3 was developed by Thomas Quarles (with A. Richard Newton
A. Richard Newton
Arthur Richard Newton was the dean of the University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering....
as advisor) in 1989. It is written in C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, uses the same netlist syntax, and added X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
plotting.
As an early open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
program, SPICE was widely distributed and used. Its ubiquity became such that "to SPICE a circuit" remains synonymous with circuit simulation. SPICE source code was from the beginning distributed by UC Berkeley for a nominal charge (to cover the cost of magnetic tape). The license originally included distribution restrictions for countries not considered friendly to the USA, but the source code is currently covered by the BSD license.
SPICE inspired and served as a basis for many other circuit simulation programs, in academia, in industry, and in commercial products. The first commercial version of SPICE was ISPICE, an interactive version on a timeshare service, National CSS
National CSS
National CSS, Inc. was a time-sharing firm in the 1960-80s, until its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet in 1979. NCSS was originally headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, but relocated to Wilton in 1978. Sales offices, data centers, and development facilities were located at various sites...
. The most prominent commercial versions of SPICE include HSPICE (originally commercialized by Shawn and Kim Hailey
Ashawna Hailey
Ashawna Hailey created the HSPICE program which large parts of the worldwide semiconductor industry use to simulate and design silicon chips...
of Meta Software, but now owned by Synopsys
Synopsys
Synopsys, Inc. is one of the largest companies in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Synopsys' first and best-known product is Design Compiler, a logic-synthesis tool. Synopsys offers a wide range of other products used in the design of an application-specific integrated circuit...
) and PSPICE
PSPICE
PSpice is a SPICE analog circuit and digital logic simulation program for Microsoft Windows. The name is an acronym for Personal Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis.- History :...
(now owned by Cadence Design Systems
Cadence Design Systems
Cadence Design Systems, Inc is an electronic design automation software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc...
). The academic spinoffs of SPICE include XSPICE, developed at Georgia Tech
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States...
, which added mixed analog/digital "code models" for behavioral simulation, and Cider (previously CODECS, from UC Berkeley/Oregon State Univ.) which added semiconductor device simulation
Semiconductor device modeling
Semiconductor device modeling creates models for the behavior of the electrical devices based on fundamental physics, such as the doping profiles of the devices. It may also include the creation of compact models , which try to capture the electrical behavior of such devices but do not generally...
. The integrated circuit industry adopted SPICE quickly, and until commercial versions became well developed many IC design houses had proprietary versions of SPICE. Today a few IC manufacturers, typically the larger companies, have groups continuing to develop SPICE-based circuit simulation programs. Among these are ADICE at Analog Devices
Analog Devices
Analog Devices, Inc. , known as ADI, is an American multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion and signal conditioning technology, headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts...
, LTspice at Linear Technology
Linear Technology
Linear Technology Corporation designs, manufactures and markets a broad line of standard high performance analog integrated circuits. Applications for the company's products include telecommunications, cellular telephones, networking products, notebook and desktop computers, video/multimedia,...
, Mica at Freescale Semiconductor
Freescale Semiconductor
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. is a producer and designer of embedded hardware, with 17 billion semiconductor chips in use around the world. The company focuses on the automotive, consumer, industrial and networking markets with its product portfolio including microprocessors, microcontrollers,...
, and TISPICE at Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
. (Other companies maintain internal circuit simulators which are not directly based upon SPICE, among them PowerSpice at IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Titan at Infineon Technologies
Infineon Technologies
Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer and was founded on April 1, 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the parent company Siemens AG were spun off to form a separate legal entity. , Infineon has 25,149 employees worldwide...
, Lynx at Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
, and Pstar at NXP Semiconductor.) SPICE was named an IEEE Milestone in 2011.
Program features and structure
SPICE became popular because it contained the analyses and models needed to design integrated circuits of the time, and was robust enough and fast enough to be practical to use. Precursors to SPICE often had a single purpose: The BIAS program, for example, did simulation of bipolar transistor circuit operating points; the SLIC program did only small-signal analyses. SPICE combined operating point solutions, transient analysis, and various small-signal analyses with the circuit elements and device models needed to successfully simulate many circuits.Analyses
SPICE2 included these analyses:- AC analysis (linearLinearIn mathematics, a linear map or function f is a function which satisfies the following two properties:* Additivity : f = f + f...
small-signalSmall signal modelSmall-signal modeling is a common analysis technique in electrical engineering which is used to approximate the behavior of nonlinear devices with linear equations...
frequency domain analysis) - DC analysis (nonlinear quiescent point calculation)
- DC transfer curve analysis (a sequence of nonlinear operating points calculated while sweeping an input voltage or current, or a circuit parameter)
- Noise analysis (a small signal analysis done using an adjoint matrix technique which sums uncorrelated noise currents at a chosen output point)
- Transfer functionTransfer functionA transfer function is a mathematical representation, in terms of spatial or temporal frequency, of the relation between the input and output of a linear time-invariant system. With optical imaging devices, for example, it is the Fourier transform of the point spread function i.e...
analysis (a small-signal input/output gain and impedance calculation) - Transient analysis (time-domain large-signal solution of nonlinear differential algebraic equations)
Since SPICE is generally used to model nonlinear circuits, the small signal analyses are necessarily preceded by a quiescent point calculation at which the circuit is linearized. SPICE2 also contained code for other small-signal analyses: sensitivity analysis
Sensitivity analysis
Sensitivity analysis is the study of how the variation in the output of a statistical model can be attributed to different variations in the inputs of the model. Put another way, it is a technique for systematically changing variables in a model to determine the effects of such changes.In any...
, pole-zero analysis, and small-signal distortion
Distortion
A distortion is the alteration of the original shape of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minimize it in practice...
analysis. Analysis at various temperatures was done by automatically updating semiconductor model parameters for temperature, allowing the circuit to be simulated at temperature extremes.
Other circuit simulators have since added many analyses beyond those in SPICE2 to address changing industry requirements. Parametric sweeps were added to analyze circuit performance with changing manufacturing tolerances or operating conditions. Loop gain and stability calculations were added for analog circuits. Harmonic balance
Harmonic balance
Harmonic balance is a method used to calculate the steady-state response of non-linear differential equations, and is mostly applied to electrical circuits...
or time-domain steady state analyses were added for RF and switched-capacitor circuit design. However, a public-domain circuit simulator containing the modern analyses and features needed to become a successor in popularity to SPICE has not yet emerged.
Device models
SPICE2 included many semiconductor device compact modelsTransistor models
Transistors are simple devices with complicated behavior. In order to ensure the reliable operation of circuits employing transistors, it is necessary to scientifically model the physical phenomena observed in their operation using transistor models. There exists a variety of different models that...
: three levels of MOSFET
MOSFET
The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor is a transistor used for amplifying or switching electronic signals. The basic principle of this kind of transistor was first patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925...
model, a combined Ebers–Moll and Gummel-Poon bipolar model
Gummel–Poon model
The Gummel–Poon model is a model of the bipolar junction transistor. It was first described in a paper published by Hermann Gummel and H. C. Poon at Bell Labs in 1970....
, a JFET
JFET
The junction gate field-effect transistor is the simplest type of field-effect transistor. It can be used as an electronically-controlled switch or as a voltage-controlled resistance. Electric charge flows through a semiconducting channel between "source" and "drain" terminals...
model, and a model for a junction diode
Diode
In electronics, a diode is a type of two-terminal electronic component with a nonlinear current–voltage characteristic. A semiconductor diode, the most common type today, is a crystalline piece of semiconductor material connected to two electrical terminals...
. In addition, it had many other elements: resistors, capacitors, inductors (including coupling), independent voltage
Voltage source
In electric circuit theory, an ideal voltage source is a circuit element where the voltage across it is independent of the current through it. A voltage source is the dual of a current source. In analysis, a voltage source supplies a constant DC or AC potential between its terminals for any current...
and current source
Current source
A current source is an electrical or electronic device that delivers or absorbs electric current. A current source is the dual of a voltage source. The term constant-current sink is sometimes used for sources fed from a negative voltage supply...
s, ideal transmission line
Transmission line
In communications and electronic engineering, a transmission line is a specialized cable designed to carry alternating current of radio frequency, that is, currents with a frequency high enough that its wave nature must be taken into account...
s, and voltage and current controlled sources.
SPICE3 added more sophisticated MOSFET models, which were required due to advances in semiconductor technology.
In particular, the BSIM
BSIM
BSIM refers to a family of MOSFET transistor models for integrated circuit design. Accurate transistor models are needed for electronic circuit simulation, which in turn is needed for integrated circuit design...
family of models were added, which were also developed at UC Berkeley.
Commercial and industrial SPICE simulators have added many other device models as technology advanced and earlier models became inaccurate. To attempt standardization of these models so that a set of model parameters may be used in different simulators, an industry working group was formed, the Compact Model Council
Compact Model Council
The Compact Model Council is a working group in the Electronic Design Automation industry formed to choose, maintain and promote the use of standard models. Commercial and industrial analog simulators need to add device models as technology advances and earlier models become inaccurate...
, to choose, maintain and promote the use of standard models. The standard models today include BSIM3, BSIM4, BSIMSOI, PSP, HICUM, and MEXTRAM.
Input and output: Netlists, schematic capture and plotting
SPICE2 took a text netlistNetlist
The word netlist can be used in several different contexts, but perhaps the most popular is in the field of electronic design. In this context, a "netlist" describes the connectivity of an electronic design....
as input and produced line-printer listings as output, which fit with the computing environment in 1975. These listings were either columns of numbers corresponding to calculated outputs (typically voltages or currents), or line-printer character "plots"
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
. SPICE3 retained the netlist for circuit description, but allowed analyses to be controlled from a command-line interface similar to the C shell
C shell
The C shell is a Unix shell that was created by Bill Joy while a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been distributed widely, beginning with the 2BSD release of the BSD Unix system that Joy began distributing in 1978...
. SPICE3 also added basic X-Window plotting, as UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
and engineering workstation
Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
s became common.
Vendors and various free software projects have added schematic capture
Schematic capture
Schematic capture or schematic entry is a step in the design cycle of electronic design automation at which the electronic diagram, or electronic schematic of the designed electronic circuit is created by a designer...
front-ends to SPICE, allowing a schematic diagram of the circuit to be drawn and the netlist to be automatically generated. Also, graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
s were added for selecting the simulations to be done and manipulating the voltage and current output vectors. In addition, very capable graphing utilities have been added to see waveforms and graphs of parametric dependencies. Several free versions of these extended programs are available, some as introductory limited packages
PSPICE
PSpice is a SPICE analog circuit and digital logic simulation program for Microsoft Windows. The name is an acronym for Personal Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis.- History :...
, and some without restrictions
Linear Technology
Linear Technology Corporation designs, manufactures and markets a broad line of standard high performance analog integrated circuits. Applications for the company's products include telecommunications, cellular telephones, networking products, notebook and desktop computers, video/multimedia,...
.
See also
- Articles on SPICE-like and other circuit simulators are listed in :Category:Electronic circuit simulators
- Input Output Buffer Information SpecificationInput Output Buffer Information SpecificationIBIS is a method for integrated circuit vendors to provide information about the input/output buffers of their product to their prospective customers without revealing the intellectual property of their implementation and without requiring proprietary encryption keys...
(IBIS) - List of free electronics circuit simulators
- Transistor modelsTransistor modelsTransistors are simple devices with complicated behavior. In order to ensure the reliable operation of circuits employing transistors, it is necessary to scientifically model the physical phenomena observed in their operation using transistor models. There exists a variety of different models that...
Histories, original papers
- The original SPICE1 paper
- L. W. Nagel's dissertation (SPICE2)
- Thomas Quarles' dissertation (SPICE3)
- Larry Nagel, "The Life of SPICE"
- A brief history of SPICE
Versions with source code available
- SPICE2 and SPICE3 at UC Berkeley
- Cider at UC Berkeley
- ngspice: SPICE3 with updates and XSPICE extensions
- Spice+ based on Spice3f5
- tclspice: ngspice and Tcl scripting
- XSPICE at Georgia Tech
- Spice Opus
- PyOPUS
- LTSPice
Tutorials, user information
- Comprehensive, detailed PSPICE tutorial and user guide at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
- The Spice Page
- LTSpice circuit simulation tutorial videos
- SPICE on gEDA HOWTO
- Spice 3 Userguide
- Spice 3 Quickstart Tutorial
- Designer's Guide Community
- SPICE Simulation tutorial
- eCircuit Center - A free source of SPICE and Excel files for the hands-on learning of circuit design and analysis.