SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuits Emphasis) is a general purpose analog circuit simulator. This powerful product is used to check the integrity of circuit designs and to predict circuit behavior.

In real-world circuits, performance is affected by component value tolerances (1%, 5%, 10%); designers want to use cheaper components if they wish to mass produce their products. In radio applications, especially UHF and microwave, parasitics cannot be ignored and must be built into a generic model of the circuit being simulated. In both these cases it is usual to perform Monte Carlo simulations which are difficult or impossible to calculate by hand.

SPICE was originally developed at the Electronics Research Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 by Larry Nagle and Donald Pederson. Versions 1 and 2 were coded in Fortran (2G.6 in 1983 was the last) but version 3 and later are coded in C. Many commercial versions of SPICE have replaced Berkeley SPICE as the industry standard. For digital circuits (e.g., RAM), dedicated simulators exist that run orders of magniutude faster than the traditional Spice tools.

The original SPICE program was released under a restrictive license, which makes it difficult to improve upon the original software. A new circuit simulator, based on SPICE, called ng-SPICE (for next-generation) is licensed under the GPL. Development on the main branch of ng-SPICE arrested around 2001, but there is an active branch called tclspice. If you want a free SPICE that works on windows, consider LTSPICE.

Commercial versions with significant market share

• HSPICE (originally from Meta Software , now owned by Synopsys)
• PSPICE
• SmartSpice (Silvaco)
• NanoSim
• NSPICE (Apache Design Solutions )
• HSIM (NASSDA )

External links

• SPICE on gEDA HOWTO http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/SPICE/simulation.html
• The Spice Page http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/SPICE/
• download TclSpice http://sourceforge.net/projects/tclspice
• download ng-SPICE http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=38962
• PSpice student download http://www.cadence.com/products/si_pk_bd/pspice.aspx
• A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPICE http://www.ecircuitcenter.com/SpiceTopics/History.htm
• LTSPICE http://www.linear.com/software/