Holger Vogt

After a short introduction to the ngspice circuit simulator the first part of the talk will present some new features available in ngspice-36. Among them are SVG plotting capability, acknowledging RKM notation (e.g. 4k7 for 4.7 KOhm resistance), new and improved convergence methods when calculation the operating point, and many others.

The second part of the talk discusses some new features under development or still under discussion, like XSPICE memory management improvements, adding BSIMCMG model for FinFETs, adding IBIS capability (together with KiCad and sparselizard), and S parameter intgration. A lot of discussions is going on among FOSS simulator developers and users about better Verilog-A support.

ngspice development is heading towards the ngspice-34 release. Three major activities are to be reported:

We have integrated the high frequency bipolar model HICUM-2.4 from TU Dresden, Germany into the C sources of ngspice. Efficient simulation of GHz circuits becomes possible.

ngspice has been adapted to efficiently serve the upcoming Open Source Skywater 0.13um CMOS PDK.

adms for ngspice has been enhanced to allow integrating Berkeley BSIM Bulk and CMG models.

Application examples will show the use of the ngspice statistical functions and control language for Monte Carlo simulation.

An update of the development activities will be presented leading to ngspice-32. Its interface to KiCad has been extended, PSPICE device model compatibility and OpAmp convergence are improved, several bugs have been fixed.

The VBIC bipolar model and the VDMOS power MOS model now incorporate the self heating effect.

This will lead to the second part of the talk: ngspice may be very well used to simulate thermal device behavior. Heat generation, transport and temperatures are translated into electrical signals. Thus we simulate two circuits: The electrical circuit with its power losses, and the thermal circuit withany resulting device heating, its feedback on the electrical behavior, and the external cooling measures that need to be provided. Some ciruit examples will be given.

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.