Re: [ng-spice] New to the list, a few questions
On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Daniel Robert Franklin wrote:
> Australia. I recently heard about this project, it sounds great - a good
> solid electronics simulator is sorely needed in Linux.
Yes, we definitevly need a good analog simulator.
>
> I have a few questions regarding the current development effort:
>
> 1) Is there a web page tracking the progress of this work?
No, ad I have discovered that I have not much time to do it. Anyone
interested ?
> 2) Is there a FAQ somewhere?
Not yet, anyone interested in compile a FAQ list ?
> 3) What are the main objectives? I know there are a few shortcomings
> in standard Berkeley SPICE in terms of accuracy etc.
Main objective: to clean the spice code and improve it0's capabilities to
reach a commercial-grade level. Think about a free spice having the
capabilities of HSPICe or SmartSPICE but open source.
> * The command line interface is not overly intuitive. Does
> ng-spice use Readline? IIRC there is a patch to 3f4/5 to add this feature...
Yes, the patch you mention was applied.
>
> * The on-line help system could be a lot better. I have found the help
> browser to be very flakey and very counter-intuitive. The use of the Athena
> Widgets seems to be a large part of this problem. I far prefer the way
> Octave handles its online help, and this does not depend on X windows.
We are not currently working on it. The first phase is code debugging and
cleaning. Emmanuel is working on the autoconf scripts to automate the
complation process under various archs. Emmanuel works is compltely
modifying the spice's configuration scheme. he os specifics should reside
on a single file.
> * Graphical output is a bit basic - I think there is a lot of scope for
> enhancing this. Octave's use of Gnuplot is smart, since it already exists
> and is pretty ubiquitous, and it works well. I think Gnuplot will interface
> fairly easily to other programs.
In a second step we are planning to ad a Probe like interface.
> * PSpice compatibility - it seems that most people use PSpice, and virtually
> all undergraduate textbooks use PSpice as their reference... whether right
> or wrong, it seems to be the dominant platform. Is there any plan to add
> PSpice-compatibility so that PSpice models and circuits can be used more
> easily with ng-spice?
We are aiming at HSPICE compatibility, which is a more "interesting"
product, by the way we can try to be *SPICE compatible *=H,P.
> * A GUI front-end a la PSpice (possibly in conjunction with the gEDA
> project?) would be very nice. This would greatly improve the accessability
> of the system for the more casual user, and should not be too difficult to
> implement.
This part of the project is underway. The people who are workning on it
are studyng GTK, Gnome, etc. and wait to have something connect to their
GUI (they will not start before september).
Paolo
Partial thread listing:
- Re: [ng-spice] New to the list, a few questions, (continued)