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April 12, 2012

frEDA SPICE 4: KiCad component repository

I have created a Mercurial repository for my KiCad SPICE component libraries at https://bitbucket.org/mithat/kicad-spice-library. At the moment it covers the same components as the PSpice library that ships with KiCad but renamed and drawn to be more consistent with IEC specs. I will add controlled sources and other SPICE primitives as time and necessity allow.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

So, are you finished with this effort? Did you expand the base library in KiCAD with additional components that you identified in your assessment of the KICAD SPICE lib?
You settled on using ngspice....can you comment on why you chose that? and some pros and cons?
Can you comment on any other open source SPICE environment compatability with KiCAD and how good they are?
TY!

Unknown said...

So, are you finished with this effort? Did you expand the base library in KiCAD with additional components that you identified in your assessment of the KICAD SPICE lib?
You settled on using ngspice....can you comment on why you chose that? and some pros and cons?
Can you comment on any other open source SPICE environment compatability with KiCAD and how good they are?
TY!

Mithat said...

@Unknown: I am *not* finished with this effort at all--but at the same time I've not needed to add any new components for my own work recently--so they don't get added. :-)

I'm attracted to ngspice because it's based on the original Berkeley SPICE3 code and of the SPICE3 engines available for Linux, it seems to be the most actively supported. SPICE is as close to a standard as there is in circuit simulation, and working within those confines is important to me ATM.

I've not looked at the FOSS simulator alternatives (e.g., Gnucap and QUCS) much at all as SPICE3 works fine for what I'm doing--mostly modeling of high-performance tube and solid-state audio circuits. AFAIK, Gnucap tries to be SPICE syntax compatible, but I haven't done any testing to see how well it works.

In spite of ngspice, and in spite of the fact that it breaks my heart a little, I use the proprietary Spice OPUS engine more than anything else. I prefer Spice OPUS to ngspice because the plots it generates look a lot better and they easier to work with. However, it seems that development of Spice OPUS has come to a crawl, so it may soon wind up that ngspice is the better option bar none.