Simulation Environments

Tools that use ngspice as simulator

In more than 15 years of maintenance and development, ngspice earned a good reputation among free spice-based simulators.  Ngspice is used as simulator in different tools, both free and commercial. Here is the list of the tools we know about (in alphabetical order). You may find graphical user interfaces with or without schematic capture, circuit development tools as well as development environments for models and devices . The XSPICE Usage deserves its own web page. 

Tools for circuit simulation with ngspice

Altium Designer 20 Altium Designer 20 represents decades of innovation and development. According to Altium its product Altium Designer has firmly established itself as the most widely used PCB design solution on the market. The recent versions 19 and 20 integrate ngspice for circuit simulation.

Blackboard allows to generate circuits on stripboards and uses ngspice for circuit simulation. The author has stopped its development, the sources are available here.

ngspice integration into the CADENCE circuit design environment is promoted by a toolset offered here.

CircuitSafari is an Android application for circuit simulation that runs the ngspice simulation engine on tablets. It offers interactive electronic schematic capture and mixed signal simulation with a touchscreen interface.

Circuit Simulator 2019 is a Linux based circuit simulator with schematic entry with many features and additional tools for measurements. It uses ngspice as simulation engine.

CoolSpice is a SPICE suite and circuit simulation software package. CoolSpice contains ngspice, a schematics editor with GUI, a plotter application, and a text editor for manually editing netlists.

Cppsim is a system simulator that integrates ngspice as transistor-level simulator. Ngspice shares the schematic capture and postprocessing tools with the other simulators included in the suite (C++ and Verilog).

DipTrace is a Schematic and PCB design software. It has a intuitive user interface and a short learning curve. It uses shared ngspice as its simulation engine.

Eagle is the well known and widely distributed PCB layout software for every engineer. It offers a complete set of PCB layout and schematic editing tools, library content, and community-driven features. From version 8.4 on Eagle integrates ngspice for circuit simulation.

EEsim is a circuit simulator based on ngspice. It runs inside the browser using WebAssembly technology. The input is a spice based netlist, and the output is your simulation result, available for plotting and viewing directly in the browser, or for downloading in CSV format for further analysis. Your netlist and results are processed locally and always remain inside your browser and are never uploaded to the network.

eSim is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. It is an integrated tool built using open source software packages KiCad, ngspice and Scilab and runs on LINUX and MS Windows.

Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for anyone. It offers a software tool (including ngspice simulator), a community website and services, fostering a creative ecosystem that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and layout and manufacture professional PCBs. Its source code is available at github.

Autodesk Fusion connects the entire manufacturing process by integrating CAD, CAM, CAE, and PCB into a single solution allowing the user to design and make anything. As a cloud product development platform it seamlessly integrates design, engineering, and electronics workflows. It is the successor of the EAGLE PCB design tool. It integrates ngspice as its electronic circuit simulation engine.

The gEDA project is a full suite and toolkit of Electronic Design Automation tools. It uses ngspice for circuit simulation.

Isotel has developed an open source software kit for mixed signal simulation and synthesis using Eagle and ngspice. A combination of mature open source packages yields a usable and working solution of Verilog simulation with mixed-signal spice, integrating ngspice with Yosys for Verilog RTL synthesis, Icarus Verilog for Verilog simulation and synthesis, gtkwave for debugging on Verilog simulation models, and graphviz for graph visualization.

KiCad is a cross platform and open source electronics design automation suite. Its schematic editor Eeschema fully integrates shared ngspice as the simulation tool. The current release of KiCad, version 7.0.0 contains ngspice-39 as its standard simulator. A Youtube video gives a short introduction, a tutorial is available, that also includes instructions how to upgrade to upcoming ngspice versions.

Kjwaves is a frontend for ngspice written in Java using NetBeans and runs on any platform where you can install 1.5 release of Java virtual machine. Kjwaves can be used as a simple plotting program to display the content of a spice RAW file or as a complete frontend to the simulator. Information on using Kjwaves with ngspice is found here. Unfortunately its development has stalled since 2007.

Layouteditor includes a schematic editor with an interface to ngspice for circuit simulation.

Memr-Spice is an extension of ngspice (based on version 32). In Memr-Spice members from the MSDA Lab at SJTU have implemented compact memristor models into ngspice to enable the simulation of memristor devices with other semiconductor devices.

MSEspice is a handy graphical front-end for ngspice. It is made with the MSEide+MSEgui cross platform development environment for Free Pascal.

Oregano is an application for schematic capture and simulation of electronic circuits. The actual simulation is performed by ngspice or other simulators.

Several interfaces are available which link ngspice to Python. These enable control of ngspice simulation or evaluation of simulation data with Python tools. Links to these projects are https://github.com/PySpice-org/PySpice, https://github.com/ignamv/ngspyce, or https://github.com/astorguy/py4spice https://ashwith.github.io/ngspicepy

Qucs-S (Qucs with Spice) is a Qucs subproject using free SPICE circuit simulation kernels (ngspice recommended) with the Qucs GUI. It merges the power of SPICE and the simplicity of the Qucs GUI.

SpiceCircuit is a is a full graphical circuit entry and simulation application for MS Windows. It is offered together with 32 bit ngspice-27. You may easily replace this by newer ngspice versions. It is Freeware for non-commercial applications.

WeSpice is an Android application for circuit simulation that actually runs ngspice simulation engine on tablets. WeSpice allows to build hierarchical schematics, symbols and models, perform simulations and analyze results, locally on the table without permanent Internet connection.

XCircuit is an open source UNIX/X11 (and Windows) program for drawing publishable-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams and related figures, and produce ngspice circuit netlists through schematic capture.

ngspice for the Unreal Engine Play games and simulate circuits (though somewhat expensive). .

XSCHEM is a schematic capture program. It allows creating a hierarchical representation of circuits with a top down approach. By focusing on interfaces, hierarchy and instance properties a complex system can be described in terms of simpler building blocks. A ngspice netlist can be generated from the drawn schematic, allowing the simulation of the circuit. .

Tools for system and device modeling (and others) integrating ngspice

efabless has been set up to re-invent the semiconductor product creation. The company applies collective and multidisciplinary community knowledge to all aspects of semiconductor product development. It uses ngspice in the tool chain. Meanwhile efabless has teamed up with Google and SkyWater to offer a free open source IC prototyping capability on a 130 nm CMOS process from SkyWater. A ngspice compatible PDK (process design kit) is available (see tips and examples).

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. Information on interfacing Octave with ngspice is found here. Octave may be used for post-processing (e.g. plotting) ngspice rawfile data.

MATLAB may be used for post-processing of ngspice simulation results. A script is availble for loading the simulation output (ngspice rawfile) into MATLAB.

OpenMETA is an open-source and free-to-use multi-domain modeling, analysis, and design toolset. It allows to bring models and analyses together to get a better view of system performance and trade-offs. ngspice is used by and included with the OpenMETA tools.

rlabplus for LINUX is an interactive, interpreted scientific programming environment which provides fast prototyping and program development, similar to Matlab(c). It integrates ngspice as a simulation tool.