pspise vs. spice

Thread Starter

psihodelia

Joined Aug 7, 2006
23
are they somehow different?

My problem is that I can't compare them, because Pspice is commercial version and I have only spice and ngspice - fully Open Source applications. I wish also to get a book, "PSpice and Circuit Analysis" by John Keown, in order to learn "spice". I have to be sure that there is not much difference between pspice and OpenSourced spice.
 

n9352527

Joined Oct 14, 2005
1,198
Basically they are all the same. They were derived from the Berkeley SPICE. Although most of the models are the same and most algorithms too, there are differences between simulation engines. These simply mean that some of them are faster, more accurate and less problematic when simulating marginal/specific circuits.

There are also vendor specific enhancements, these include digital/mixed-signal simulations, more extensive device parameters and much much more.

For your purposes, I think it is safe to assume that the differences are negligible.
 

Thread Starter

psihodelia

Joined Aug 7, 2006
23
n9352527 said:
Basically they are all the same. They were derived from the Berkeley SPICE. Although most of the models are the same and most algorithms too, there are differences between simulation engines. These simply mean that some of them are faster, more accurate and less problematic when simulating marginal/specific circuits.

There are also vendor specific enhancements, these include digital/mixed-signal simulations, more extensive device parameters and much much more.

For your purposes, I think it is safe to assume that the differences are negligible.
thank you very much
 

Dave

Joined Nov 17, 2003
6,969
Pspice is merely a version of Spice for a personal computer, hence the insertion of the "P" in the name. Like n9352527 says just accept that it is the same as Spice for your purposes. There are others like Synopsys's HSpice and LTSpice from Linear technologies which are really just different strains of the Spice system.

Dave
 

Thread Starter

psihodelia

Joined Aug 7, 2006
23
Pspice is merely a version of Spice for a personal computer, hence the insertion of the "P" in the name. Like n9352527 says just accept that it is the same as Spice for your purposes. There are others like Synopsys's HSpice and LTSpice from Linear technologies which are really just different strains of the Spice system.

Dave
I know, some people say that ngspice (OpenSource) is the best one
 

n9352527

Joined Oct 14, 2005
1,198
I know, some people say that ngspice (OpenSource) is the best one
Technically, that is debatable. I can think of many applications where ngspice is not a suitable tool.

As with many engineering tools, there is actually no one single best solution. You choose one that best suit your main intended purposes and make compromises in other areas.

Each one of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, and also targeted applications, but these would only affect the small percentages of users that push close to the limits and need the extra features.

If you are just starting with SPICE and your main area of interest is general circuit simulations, then in my opinion any one of them would do the job. Probably, the main thing that you really need in this case is the ease of use more than anything else.
 
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