Text for NG-Spice web page


To Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@seul.org>
From Paolo Nenzi <pnenzi@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it>
Date Tue, 10 Aug 1999 15:23:06 +0200 (CEST)
cc ahvezda@cran.mit.edu, ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
In-Reply-To <199908090202.WAA27225@cran.mit.edu>
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

Dear Ales,

Thank you for the web page.  The text follows:

What is ng-spice ?

ng-spice is both the name of the program itslef and the name of the
project. The ng-spice project aims to improve the capabilities of the
spice3f5 circuit simulator from the Berkeley CAD Group. 

The project is divided in two main phases, in the first one the original
code will undergo a "cleaning" process, and in the second improvements
will be inserted and tested. In the cleaning phase, all the configuration
code will be put under autoconf (thus eliminating the old configuration
interface), most of the #defines for non ANSI C compilers removed and
the support for non-UNIX or obsolete operating systems discarded. I this
phase we expect to close already known bugs.

In the second phase we will add new features which should include:

 * Better convergence in Operating Point Calculation replacing the
   Newton-Raphson algorithm, a modified version of Fixed-Point 
   Homotopy.

 * Dynamically Loadable Devices. At this time all devices' models must
   be statically linked to the simulator code. In this approach the
   parser will decide which device to load according to the netlist. 
   This will reduce the memory occupied by the simulator.

 * New types of analysis, oriented to circuits syntesis and optmization.

 * ... whatever else we can add that we will judge useful.

At the end we will expect to have a new powerful tool for analog (and may
be mixed-mode) circuit simulation. What we will do depends most on the
people interested in the project, to join the development team subscribe
to the list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it. To subscribe write an empty
message to the address: ng-spice-subscribe@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it.


What are the latest features in the current release ?

 * New features:

   - Autoconf interface. 
   - BSIM 3.2.2 Model.
   - Temperature and resistance sweeps.
   
 * Bug fixes:
   
   - Altermod command connected to the parse.
   - Some memory leaks closed.
   - Spice3f5 fixes available on the net. 


What does it look like ?

This is a command line utility, no screenshots.


Who are the authors of ng-spice ?

The development is open to anyone who wish to contribute.
People who contributed are:

Paolo Nenzi
Serban-Mihai Popescu
Emmanuel Rouat
Michael Widlok

What is the current version ?

0.2 (released on 08/08/1999) 

Where can I download it ?

ng-spice is distributed separately from gEDA. You can download it from
ftp://ieee.ing.uniroma1.it/pub/ng-spice/distribution



-------------END-------------

I hope to have written an understandable text. Any suggestion will be
accepted. To the people listed: would you like to appear ? please send me
the email address ?

 

Paolo


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