SPICE Engine Analysis and Circuit Simulation Application Development

Abstract

Electrical design automation plays an important role in nowadays electronic industry. Various commercial Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) packages IntroductionKnowledge of the behavior of electrical circuits requires the simultaneous solution of a number of equations.The model creation [1], circuit simulation [2] and testing [3], and application of analog circuit and VLSI [4] require the assisstance of simulation tools. As a general-purpose circuit-simulation program that solves the network equations for the node voltage for nonlinear DC, nonlinear transient, and linear AC analysis, SPICE in its different versions has been the main computer-aided analysis program used in analog design, and diagnosis for researchers, printing circuit board and electrical device manufacture for engineering and in universities and colleges for student education for over 40 years. This widely used spice-softwares, such as pSpice, hSpice, ngSpice, shares same engine which was re-developed or modified on the base of Berkeley's kernel and to provide various interfaces and functions.However, this commercial software cannot be used to develop customized software free. In fact, it is well known that SPICE engine is open-source and free use by researchers all over the world. To make customized simulation software, researchers had various customer modification after analysis of the simulation algorithms [5],data structure and code structure. In 1980s, SPICE with version 2 had already rewrited in C code and ported in PC [6]. The 1990s saws various expansion of SPICE with multimedia technology [7] and networks [8,9] with its application in engineer and education. In the later two decades, the simulation algorithms were continously modified to speed the convergence [10,11] and improve the accuracy [12]. In the new centery, various virtual circuit labaroty [13,14] and studies [15][16][17] had been build by the aid of these customized spice-like simulations. To the author's knowledge, there is little information aviable about the computation principle and its simulations of the SPICE engine. Further, the detail information about the re-development of the simulation software with spice engine and C++ is also helpful to programmers.In this paper, we conducted this study to analyze the inner workings of SPICE engine and customized simulation software development based on the spice kernel. The experiments verified the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed approach.