MacSpice

MacSpice is an electronic circuit simulator. 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 uses a text-file 'netlist' description of the circuit as input. This 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 runs on Intel architecture Apple Mac computers. It is compatible with Berkeley Spice 3f5 but incorporates many improvements - 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.

Enhancements:

• Added 'multiplot' option to 'plot' command to allow pointplots and lineplots on the same graph.
• Modified FFT-based routines to use vDSP where possible.
• Improved error-reporting for some types of syntax error and the specificity of certain error messages.
• Enabled use of '/dev/null' as output file.
• Fixed dependence of dp in rusage values on numdgt.

Bugs fixed:

• Plot style 'combplot' draws vertical lines to the x-axis instead.
• Implemented Spice 2 compatibility described in §4.4.2 of User Guide.
• Paging of lines output from 'echo'.
• Intermittent console redraw-lag.
• Console window should be either behind all or infront of graph windows.
• Stop allowing ']' to close '(' without when evaluating command line expressions.
• Prevented 'compose' clobbering an existing vector.
• Error trapping in fopenResolvingAliases()
• Memory leak in FFT functions invoking vDSP.
• displayWriteBuffer() now traps nil values for str.

Other Changes:

• 32-bit binary removed from application bundle.