Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2024

schedule

ngspice circuit simulator - stand-alone and embedded into KiCad


The talk will report on the current status and ongoing developments for ngspice. There are a lot of enhancements for simulation during IC design: New optional matrix solver KLU enables simulating circuits with > 200k transistors and speeds-up simulation by more than 3x. Verilog-A compact device models for modern devices (FinFET etc.) are supported. Open-Source PDKs are supported (Skywater, GF, IHP, ASAP7 ...). C-code may be embedded during simulation, as well as digital Verilog (compiled with Verilator). The preferred user interface for IC design is XSCHEM.

On the discrete, PCB based simulation side the user interface for embedding ngspice into KiCad has made a large jump forward when looking at 7.99 (upcoming KiCad 8). Setting up simulations has been completely revised, new ways of evaluating simulation data are available. Besides the traditional sim setpus (op, dc, tran, noise etc.) now als IBIS (interface) simulation may be used.

Some simple live setups may show how to make use of this KiCad/ngspice interface.

Speakers

Holger Vogt

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