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:

• Improve behaviour when executable is used as command line tool.
• Modify parsing of .options, etc. to be more tolerant of numerical values with trailing garbage, e.g. 'CJ=.2MF/M^2' and garbage.
• Modify back-quote evaluation to use posix_spawn(2) instead of vfork(2).
• Improve error reporting for 'alter', 'altermod' and various other commands.
• Include error messages for continuation and .include lines in 'listing' display.
• Add HiSIM2 mosfet device (version 2.8.0) as level 61.
• Update BSIM4 device to version 4.8.0 of model.
• Update BSIM4 SOI device to version 4.3.1 of model.
• Update HiSIM-HV device model to version 2.2.0 of model.
• Improve parsing of expressions involving the comma operator, e.g. 'let z = 1,2'.
• Improve naming of temporary files to ensure uniqueness.
• Add warning when 'tran' analysis does not specify a TMAX value larger than (TSTOP - TSTART)

Bugs fixed:

• Crash when subcircuit definition is empty.
• Crash when 'alter' is invoked with complex arguments.
• Crash when 'tran' analysis TMAX value is smaller than (TSTOP - TSTART)
• Crash when 'rspice' command is invoked.
• Convert line-breaks in the 'news' file from CR to LF.
• Back-quote evaluation can be interrupted with Command-.,etc.
• Unreliable detection of duplicate subcircuit instances.
• Some small memory leaks.
• Behaviour of 'aspice' command.