kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

As some of you have noticed, we've been working on a "secret" feature
during the hackathon at CERN. The feature we're talking about is an
integrated circuit simulator. Currently it features:
- Seamless integration into schematic editor,
- AC/Transient/DC sweep simulations,
- Voltage probing from the schematics,
- Live tuning of component values.

A video demonstrating the capabilities of the new simulator is available
on Tom's YouTube channel [1].

The code is currently available in the ngspice branch on Tom's GitHub
[2] for review & testing. It's a big feature, so we didn't want to push
it immediately to the product branch. We'll greatly appreciate your
feedback!

The simulator uses ngspice [3] as the Spice kernel. We'd like to thank
ngspice developers for providing a DLL interface which made seamless
integration of ngspice into Kicad possible.

In order to get started:
- install ngspice shared library (is not provided by many Linux distros,
Arch Linux is a known exception, so you might have to compile it from
the sources with --with-ngshared --enable-xspice options).  Windows
DLLs, msys2 PKGBUILD & binary packages (to be included soon in
the official msys2 repo, currently merged to
https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/) & Linux script to build the
library are available at [4].
- compile eeschema with -DKICAD_SPICE=ON option,
- have a look at some examples in demos/simulation directory.

Happy simulating,
Tom

[1] https://youtu.be/A2_-hdRcf4U
[2] https://github.com/twlostow/kicad-dev/tree/ngspice
[3] http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
[4] https://orson.net.pl/pub/libngspice