_____ Tests and Quality Assurance _____
In this section you will find some test circuits as netlists or Eeschema input files. Again you are welcome to contribute!
Paranoia tests were suggested by Dietmar Warning. A large number of ngspice netlists has been assembled, a script ./paranoia_tests.sh will run these examples under Valgrind and summarize the results. Valgrind will detect memory leaks (a few are still there, new ones may be introduced during code development). Unfortunately Valgrind is not available for MS Windows. Thus Linux is required to run the script. Running the tests, being paranoid, is a good attitude if large code changes are to be released.
Test circuits for simulation in KiCad
KiCad/Eeschema uses the ngspice shared library to allow simulating electronic circuits directly from the circuit diagram. kicad-test-circuits.7z contains several circuits, simple and more sophisticated ones to test the eeschema-ngspice couple. Plots showing expected results are included.
To challenge any circuit simulator, there has been published a test bench in 1985 at ISCAS (see large test circuits for the ngspice compatible version). At that time in fact an absolute challenge, even today any simulator (like ngspice) may be benchmarked by running these circuits (with up to 3512 gates and (optional) back-annotated passives).
ngspice (regression) test circuits
The ngspice distribution also provides a lot of test circuits . Many of the available devices are bench-marked here.
If you build ngspice on macOS, Linux or Cywin(Windows),
you may run the make check command. A regression test is started, using the
regression circuits
that are distributed with ngspice. After various short syntax checks and functional tests we use
the QA (quality assurance) simulation approach to verify the correctness of the
BSIM3, BSIM4, HiSIM, and HICUM model implementations. As this check may require
a large amount of CPU time, there is a configure option --enable-shortcheck
available, which focuses the check upon BSIM3 and BSIM4.
