Which software package for simulation?

Jim T. uses PSpice, but he's the only one who can afford that.

Otherwise, "we all" use the free, fast, excellent LTSpice, also known as SwitcherCad.

Oh and Kevin uses SuperSpice because he wrote it.

I've used it on occasion; at work we do have a copy.

I prefer SI-Metrix, although I would admit that the PSpice engine does have some fancier features that SI-Metrix doesn't.

Pulsonix makes for a decent front-end to SI-Metrix. (When you buy "Pulsonix SPICE" you're getting SI-Metrix as the simulator.)

LTSpice is, of course, excellent for the price... and you often don't have much of a choice if you're using LT's parts! (Almost all of their SPICE models use proprietary LTSpice features.)

You also see folks here using Electronics Workbench. I used it once years ago and it struck me as a little too PlaySkool at the time, but perhaps it's improved since then. Hmm... looks like National Instrucments has acquired them...

---Joel

Maintenance is under $2K/year (I don't use Capture), which is not a significant percentage of my income ;-)

I've written so many auxiliary tools and symbols for it, it'd be hard to walk away from :-(

...Jim Thompson

Jim ain't the 'only' user of PSpice here. Several of the others have it for when they 'need' to know the results are correct. While LTSpice is a good product, since its free, some suits refuse to acknowledge its existance!

Also, the front end for it is not nearly as good as the front end for PSpice, whether Schemtics (Jim...) or Capture.

Charlie

I use spice3f5 running on a quad xenon 3GHz box with 8T bytes of memory (virtual server of course). Most simulations take minutes on my desktop and seconds on the server.

Agreed, although for one person (Mike Engelhardt) it's OK. It's too bad that Cadence doesn't hire more Mike Engelhardt-types to work on their software anymore -- I get the impression he's exactly the sort of individual that worked on PSpice during its "glory days" and added all that cool behavioral modeling stuff, fancy macro capabilities, etc.

---Joel

"It's crap" (Aylward, et al) .

"EWB sucks. This has been noted so many times it should be stated in the group FAQs." (Larkin, et al) .

"we need [to form] a club for people who have returned EWB. (Larkin, et al) .

The companies that have owned it have further tarred it with their bad reputations. Folks who do have Multisim (nee EWB), generally got it off P2P.

Hello "linnix",

Since when is spice 3f5 multithreaded? Any link? As far as I know, there is no SPICE using multiple processors for the math.

I think a PC with a 3GHz Core2 Duo processor will give you the best perfomance you can buy today.

Best regards, Helmut

Try it and you won't hate yourself in the morning!

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It's not, but I can run multiple batch simulations with different parameters.

I was running out of memory on my desktop with 512M, even with a very simple circuit. Large memory space helps with bigger circuit. I don't need a powerful desktop for anything else, so a shared virtual server makes more sense.

"linnix" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@d30g2000prg.googlegroups.com...

Hello Linnix,

That's indeed a good idea especially when using an optimizer. I will keep this idea in mind.

The 512MB are indeed at th low end. I have 2GB even on my PC at home. This helps a lot when the output file becomes large during a simulation. It also helps when viewing signals from such a large file.

I forgot to mention that I use LTspice. You could use it with WINE and Linux too. There is a user group for LTspice.

Best regards, Helmut

Hi Andrew,

I'm using Beige Bag (spice simulator) for analog circuit simulation. It is cheap (V5 professional: 399USD) and comes with a large model database.

Best regards,

Wim PA3DJS