Ngspice
Encyclopedia
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:
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.
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:
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.
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...
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
SPICE
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 designs and to predict circuit behavior.- Introduction :Unlike board-level designs composed of discrete...
. 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
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
packages: Spice3f5
SPICE
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 designs and to predict circuit behavior.- Introduction :Unlike board-level designs composed of discrete...
, Cider1b1 and Xspice:
- SPICESPICESPICE 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 designs and to predict circuit behavior.- Introduction :Unlike board-level designs composed of discrete...
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
SPICE
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 designs and to predict circuit behavior.- Introduction :Unlike board-level designs composed of discrete...
netlists containing polynomial sources are correctly parsed.
Ngspice is licensed under BSD license.