ngspice is the open source spice simulator for electric and electronic circuits.
Such a circuit may comprise of JFETs, bipolar and MOS transistors, passive elements like R, L, or C, diodes, transmission lines and other devices, all interconnected in a netlist. Digital circuits are simulated as well, event driven and fast, from single gates to complex circuits. And you may enter the combination of both analog and digital as a mixed-signal circuit.
ngspice offers a wealth of device models for active, passive, analog, and digital elements. Model parameters are provided by our collections, by the semiconductor device manufacturers, or from semiconductor foundries. The user adds her circuits as a netlist, and the output is one or more graphs of currents, voltages and other electrical quantities or is saved in a data file.
ngspice does not provide schematic entry. Its input is command line or file based.
It is based on three open source software packages: Spice3f5, Cider1b1 and Xspice:
- Spice3 is the most famous and used circuit simulator. It was developed University of California at Berkeley (UCB), by “a cast of thousand” (as they say).
- Cider is a mixed-level simulator that already includes Spice3f5 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 Spice3 that provides code modeling support and simulation of digital components through an embedded event driven algorithm.
Website: ngspice.sourceforge.io
Support: FAQ
Developer: Ngspice Contributors Team
License: BSD-3-Clause License
ngspice is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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