MacSpice 3f5 2.10.14

MacSpice 3f5... Circuit simulation is a way of building and testing virtual models of electronic devices. It is usually cheaper and quicker to simulate a design than to build a prototype. MacSpice, like most circuit simulators, requires a text-file description of the circuit as input. This netlist is a list of components and the nodes they connect to. Users may prepare netlists with a text editor, or derive them from a circuit diagram using a third-party schematic-capture application. MacSpice then builds a numerical model of the circuit and analyses this.

A command interpreter (shell) is used to specify the types of analyses that are required and how the results should be processed, saved or displayed. The high quality of the MacSpice command interpreter makes the automation of tasks straightforward.

MacSpice has native support for both PowerPC and Intel architecture Apple Macintosh computers. It is derived from, and compatible with, Berkeley Spice 3f5. MacSpice incorporates many improvements to Spice 3f5 - from simple bug-fixes to entirely new commands, algorithms and solution strategies. For example: the memory leaks that affected Spice 3f4 have been cured; new algorithms have been developed to facilitate the simulation of large circuits, and to reduce simulation time; MacSpice provides a robust multi-parameter optimizer and facilities for inter-process communication with other applications.

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Version 2.10.14:

Enhancements:

Graph cursors behave better.
AC Sensitivity analysis now positions grid points accurately and can resume after interruption.
Improved pole/zero analysis - negligible complex components are rounded to zero.
Vectors use memory more efficiently.
Better frontend performance when large numbers of vectors are in existence.
The big_endian/little_endian flag is now implemented for rawfiles written in batch mode.
Case-insensitive string comparisons are performed faster.
A warning is now issued when breakpoints are being ignored, e.g. because pulse rise-times are shorter than the value of MINBREAK.
var_free() and ctl_free() procedures re-coded to avoid potential stack overflow in extreme cases.
Improved display of mutual inductance parameters by 'show'.
Improved numerical stability of interpolate() frontend function.
Improved 'rusage' statistics for interrupted transient simulations.
Improved default behaviour of 'xd' and 'alpha' parameters for MOS3 devices.

Bugs fixed:

'shift' no longer causes a crash when it is given invalid arguments.
'goto $foo' when $foo has no value no longer crashes.
Cured potential history list corruption when 'set history = 0' is used.
Cured some minor memory leaks occurring during:
- conversion of circuit parameters to vectors;
- destruction of parse nodes referring to user-defined functions;
- tokenization of models with zero-length parameters.
AC sensitivity analysis now works with non-linear devices.
Correct evaluation of lists containing empty lists.
Variables 'numdgt' and 'rawprec' now unset at the first attempt.

Mac OS X 10.3 or later. Versions for older Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic versions listed under 'related links'.