Ngspice circuit simulator

After a long periode of silence, NGspice team is proud to announce you that ng-spice-rework-18 will be released the 1st of december. This is an incredible gift, you can offer your collegues, your friends or your familly. A lot of work have been done since August, 30th 2005: Bug fixes and new features. Ngspice gets every release closer from a state of the art simulator. Road is long, but release 18 is a step more, and overall it is a promising step. The main interest of ngspice it that it makes converge the many divergent spice implementations, by collecting papers, and looking at the functionalities of other spice branches. Some features have been added at netlist level, as parametrical netlists and .lib statement. Ngspice is now one of most versatile spice implementation as it can deal with a very large set of netlists functionalities.

A special thanks to Phil Bakers, for contributing numparam, the parametrical netlist. and .lib statement
Holger Vogt for windows integration and fft command on spice vectors
Gong Ding for the interface with GSS-TCAD semiconductor simulator.
Lionel Sainte Cluque from bringing back tclspice in ngspice.
Thanks to Paolo Nenzi, Dietmar Warning, Steven Borley for their huge contribution.

I would say that the importance of release 18 is not only the features it provides, but the basis it makes for futur developpement of ngspice. Ngspice is in the short list of the high quality open source circuit simulation programs. For this reason it has been integrated with little or great success in many EDA workflows. Nevertheless, I think that better integration can be achieved, and open source EDA suites are, for the moment, and I hope this will change, of a much lower quality that proprietary ones. It lacks features, and it lacks integration between tools. NGspice make a step toward others open source EDA softwares by clarifying its license and providing tclspice. Tclspice, released under GNU LGPL, is a library loadable in a tcl interpreter that gives acces to spice simulation through tcl commands. I hope that soon, some nice tcl interfaces can bundle schematic editors, spice pre/post processors, BOM databases, and so on.

A reflexion has been undertaken on the evolutions that can be made. Many big features are planned. I hope these project will take form soon. As an open source project, you are welcome to contribute. Please, visit the Developement and Roadmap pages .

Gong Ding has connected ngspice to his own 2D TCAD software: GSS. With GSS you can perform numerical simulations of semiconductor devices and pre/post process data. GSS can be used independently of ngspice to analize the behaviour of single device or together with it to perform mixed-level simulation of the device performing in a given circuit. Look at the GSS section in the ngspice web site.

Andre' Stemper has re-written ngspice to run on ARM based Pocket PCs. You can enter your netlist using a text editor on your Pocket PC and simulate it . Andre' says: "The idea of simulating on a PDA came to me when I was bend over a rather large schematic and used my Pocket PC to calculate a filter. Being able to simulate a small part of a schematic while drawing the first drafts and reusing this work later on during the simulation of the complete system, was one of the major reasons to port ngspice."

You can find the porting of ngspice for pocket pcs on Andre' web site.

Laurent Lamaitre has ported his modeling system adms into ngspice. It is now possible to add Verilog-AMS coded devices. This is a great improvement for ngspice, thansk Laurent!

Latest Release	Release Date	Notes
rework-18	01-December-2008
Latest Release	Release Date	Notes
rework-17	30-August-2005
Latest Devel Release	Release Date	Notes
rework-15-fixedRC3	05-September-2004	Obsolete