Circuit Simulation in GNU/Linux – Lets begin!

Welcome back! 🙂

As promised, here is the first of my tutorials on EDA in GNU/Linux. In this post we will start with SPICE simulations. Please remember that I’m a total beginner to these tools as well so I could be wrong at places (post a comment and I’d be happy to correct) and that my examples will remain very simple.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial you’ll need these tools installed.

• gEDA gschem – A schematic capture program.
• gnetlist – a program that converts your schematic to a netlist.
• ngspice and gnucap – circuit simulators.
• gspiceUI – A graphical circuit simulator.
• gwave – a waveform viewer.

This tutorial assumes that you have taken up a course on basic electronic circuits. It would help if you know how to write a spice netlist but its not a necessity.

EDA in GNU/Linux

As I mentioned in my previous post, I will be posting a few tutorials on EDA in GNU/Linux. EDA, Electronic Design Automation, is basically a class of tools which make an electronics engineer’s life a lot easier. (Wikipedia article). These tools are used by every company or institute. Most of you would have heard of SPICE (known popularly as PSpice), a circuit simulation tool. Many similar tools exist for analog and digital circuits, VLSI design, embedded systems and PCB (printed circuit board) design. However, most of the well known proprietary tools are very costly for an individual to buy and use. In college, students end up using cracked (which is illegal and I discourage this) versions of software. Evaluation versions do not have most of the important features or are valid for just a few days.