Re: [ng-spice] NG-SPICE Project
Paolo Nenzi wrote:
>
> This long message describes what NG-SPICE may become in the (near ?)
> future. I used a question mark because, as you will read, most of the
> features of ng-spice are found on Hi-quality commercial products and
> (which is the true reason) I have no idea on how can be implemented.
>
> ** Why resurrecting Berkeley's Spice ?
>
> Berkeley's spice can be considered the father of most circuit simulator
> available today. It is an old but still good piece of software. It may not
> be the fastest or the most reliable, but it's free,
My wish would be to put the stuff under GPL. At the moment, it seems most
of the code is under a BSD Licence, but I'm not sure all of it is.
it is available in
> source code, and most of the electrical simulators inherited it's syntax.
> On the more technical side, spice3f4(5) uses good numerical algorithms
> (commercial implementations have only strengthened them), implements most
> of the models for MOSFET submicron designs and has a powerful set of
> analyses. On the more "social" side: it's weel introduced in the
> academic environment.
>
>
> ** What does it means NG-SPICE ?
>
> It stands for Next Generation Spice but that's not the official name of
> the projest. This projects still lacks a name. NG-SPICE is a temporary
> name.
>
> ** What will be NG-SPICE ?
>
> Berkeley's Spice lacks in three directions:
>
> a) Graphical user interface (I prefer to say "the framework").
> b) Documentation.
> c) Features in the code.
>
> * The framework:
> Spice is (and should continue to be) acommand line or a text tool, but
> this makes very difficult to design large circuits. To overcome this
> difficulty, a schematic entry tool and a waveform viewer tool are
> needed. Nevertheless, there are other tools that can be useful:
> a parts database, an editor which higlights the syntax, a symbol
> editor, etc. Most of these program already exists in the open source
> world, so they need ony to be integrated in a common EDA environment.
> This is the first direction of development.
Objection: there are many schematic editors that can spit out spice netlists.
Integrating the stuff into an EDA environment (gEDA for instance) should't
be top priority.
Top priority should be the simulator itself (I would start with some code
cleanup first - spice3 is a mess!)
I'm already trying to integrate the spice3f5 source code under automake and
autoconf, but it's not an easy task!
As for the syntax highlighting editor, I have written a mode for xemacs that
does
that (well , it's for Eldo, but Eldo has spice-like syntax) - if people are
interested...
manu
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