SPICE1 evolved into the more usable SPICE3 in 1975. That wasn’t too bad if you weren’t an EE undergrad doing it all from scratch, but it was a task that cried out for a computer-based solution.īased on prior classified work in nuclear engineering, Laurence Nagel, a UC Berkeley grad student working under Professor Donald Pederson, developed SPICE1 in FORTRAN and unveiled it in 1973. Spice’s Historyīefore there was spice, an engineer would draw a circuit, manually perform a nodal analysis using Kirchhoff’s current laws, write down the matrix of equations using Laplace transforms, solve the mesh, and extract the actual circuit behavior using reverse transforms. On the other hand, they can provide usable results more quickly, and they don’t allow users to make the kinds of mistakes that used to annoy Bob Pease (see “ What Did Bob Pease Really Think About Spice?"). In contrast to the Spice-like tools, none of these latter resources provide the same degree of flexibility. Intersil offers a free version of its iSim:PE design tool, which works with Intersil’s op amps and power management devices. For that matter, Analog Devices’ Circuits from the Lab is an extensive library of bench-proven designs.Ĥ. Like TI’s WEBENCH, which was developed at National Semiconductor before it was acquired by TI, it creates custom design solutions for specific conditions based on the company’s chips, rather than allowing an engineer to simulate designs ad-hoc. Intersil now offers iSim:PE presently exclusively for Intersil’s op amps and power management devices ( Fig. To protect that base, NI’s licensing agreement with ADI prevents users from employing the free version in an academic environment. In its academic versions, MultiSim is a familiar environment to many engineers from their college days. Analog Devices offers a downloadable version of National Instruments’ MultiSim tool, called MultiSim Component Evaluator – Analog Devices Edition. Although it provides full Spice-like design capture, simulation, and analysis, the download license agreement says the tool may not be used in a university teaching environment by any student or faculty member.ģ. In a similar reduced feature-set arrangement, Analog Devices offers a downloadable version of National Instruments’ MultiSim tool called MultiSim Component Evaluator – Analog Devices Edition ( Fig. ![]() TINA also allows users to generate and debug microcontroller code to run the simulated circuit under MCU control. Texas Instruments began offering Design Soft’s TINA Spice-like design capture and simulation tool when it acquired Burr-Brown in 2000. Users also can analyze switched-mode power supplies (SMPS), RF, communication, and optoelectronic circuits, as well as generate and debug microcontroller code to run the simulated circuit under MCU control.Ģ. ![]() A complete version of TINA Design Suite provides additional capabilities for real-time testing of analog, digital, VHDL, MCU, and mixed electronic circuits and their printed-circuit board (PCB) layouts. ![]() ![]() Texas Instruments provides downloadable TINA-TI, a customized version of DesignSoft’s TINA Design Suite, which offers design capture, simulation, and analysis capabilities that are similar to Spice ( Fig. It is also unique in that the same designer who created it 15 years ago is still maintaining and upgrading it. Linear Technology’s LTspice, with more than 500,000 copies downloaded, is both the oldest and the most popular free tool for PCB circuit layout and simulation. More than half a million copies have been downloaded from Linear’s site ( 1. In fact, several companies offer free downloadable Spice simulators or “Spice-like” software that provides for schematic capture and simulation.įor more than 15 years, Linear Technology has offered LTspice, internally developed and still maintained by Mike Engelhardt ( Fig. But now that it’s possible to encode the details, most analog semiconductor companies provide Spice models of their devices. Most companies used to be concerned that models would reveal their secret intellectual property (IP).
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