The talk will review the current status of ngspice, the open source spice simulator for electric circuits. After some years of quiet development, with release of ngspice-27 in 2017 we have accelerated the pace for development. Major activities have been around compatibility, code stability and features for enhanced applicability.
After some years of quiet development, with release of ngspice-27 in 2017 we have accelerated the pace for development of ngspice. Major activities have been around compatibility, towards PSPICE, to serve users by enabling discrete circuit simulation with vendor device models. ngspiceas well read HSPICE compaitible commercial PDKs for IC simulation.
ngspice may be compiled into three variants on most operating systems. Standard is the executable with console or file input and output via plots and data saved to file. Shared ngspice is a shared library without user interface. All data may be transferred over the api of the library, so a master program may get full control over the simulator. A third variant is tclspice, a shared library with tcl/tk interface. The talk will give a comparison of the three variants, with usgae examples.
ngspice provides full analog simulation capability, but also contains a digital event simulator by integration of XSPICE. Its status will be reviewd.
Short term future activites are planned towards full UNICODE support by applying utf-8 throughout the simulator, a better integration of XSPICE and an update to adms for supporting recent MOS or bipolar device models.
Speakers: Holger Vogt