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.
What’s new:
Version 2.10.11:
Enhancements:
• Control structures now glob expressions during evaluation.
• AC analyses no longer create frequency scales comprising complex values.
• Improved statistical properties of random number generators used by rnd() and ‘compose’.
Bugs fixed:
• Repairs to the interpolate() frontend function.
• Reduce number of cases where ‘Not enough space to perform Paste’ errors may occur.
• The distribution of numbers produced by rnd(n) is now uniform for values of n that are not powers of 2.
