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Re: gEDA-user: ngspice/tclspice and SPICE 2 POLYs

Being that I haven't looked at Spice, etc. since my college days which was better than 25 years ago...

Can some kind soul explain to me the basic functional differences between gnucap and say - tclspice?

Thanks,

Steve Wilson

Stuart Brorson wrote:

Hello,

As some of you know, the "official" gEDA SPICE simulator is ngspice.
Unfortunately, development on the main branch ngspice has been dead
for several years. The last version of ngspice was ngspice-rework-14,
which was released back in 2000.

This is to let you know that development on ngspice has been continued
on the tclspice branch. Tclspice includes extensions to allow you to
run SPICE commands from within a TCL program, which is a useful thing
if you want to do e.g. scripted design automation. You can read more
about it at:

http://tclspice.sourceforge.net/

Note that tclspice can be used in the normal way, just like ngspice --
that is, it gives you a command prompt, and you can type commands at
it as well as read in netlists & simulate them.
Starting today, another thing which tclspice now brings you is the
ability to use SPICE 2 POLY attributes in controlled sources. This is
a "good thing" (TM) because lots of vendors use controlled source
POLYs in their models. I have spent literally months getting this
functionality up and running, and I believe that I have finally done
it. You can get a version of tclspice with controlled source POLYs
at my website:
http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/ngspice/ngspice.html

The version with SPICE 2 POLY support is called tclspice-0.2.10-sdb.
To try it out, download it from my website and build it using the
instructions given there. If you have any problems with it, please
e-mail me; I am interested in making sure that it works for as many
people as possible (as long as I am not swamped with support requests . . . .)

Note that this branch of tclspice hasn't been integrated into the main
branch yet. However, I figure that it will be integrated at the next
"official" tclspice release. Meanwhile, the differences between my
release and the official one are only in the minor version, so it
should be no biggie.

Thanks for letting me blow my horn; I hope this is useful to the wider
community.

Stuart