.Modelica.Electrical.Spice3.UsersGuide.Overview

Information

Overview of Spice3 library

The Spice3 library is a Modelica library that contains some models of the Berkeley SPICE3 analog simulator.

General information about the analog simulator SPICE3

SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a simulator for analog electrical circuits. It was developed as one of the first analog simulators in the university of Berkeley. SPICE netlists, which contain the circuit that shall be simulated, are a de-facto-standard up to now. For nearly every electrical circuit a SPICE netlist exists. Today the current version of SPICE is SPICE3e/SPICE3f. SPICE contains basic elements (resistor, inductor, capacitor), sources and semiconductor devices (diode, bipolar transistors, junction field effect transistors, MOS-field effect transistors) as well as models of lines. Out of this offered pool of elements, the circuits that shall be simulated are build as SPICE netlists.

The Spice3-library for Modelica

The Spice3 library was extracted from original SPICE3 C++ code. To be sure the Modelica models are correct the simulation results were compared to SPICE3. This way was chosen since SPICE3 is the only open source Spice simulator.

The Spice3-library was built in accordance to the model structure in SPICE. It contains the following packages:

• Examples
• Basic (R, C, L, controlled sources)
• Semiconductors (MOS (P, N), BJT(NPN PNP), Diode, semiconductor resistor)
• Sources (constant, sinusoidal, exponential, pulse, piece wise linear, single-frequency FM, respectively for V and I)
• Additionals (useful features from SPICE2)
• Interfaces
• Internal (functions and data needed to model the semiconductor devices)
  

Since the semiconductor models, especially MOS and BJT, are very complex models, many functions, data and parameters were needed for their description. Therefore a special Package called Internal was created that contains all the functions and records with data and parameters that are needed for the semiconductor models. It is not necessary that a user of the library works inside this package, so it is not for user access. The package Additionals is also a special one. It is not part of the original SPICE3. Nevertheless it contains useful models or features like the polynomial sources of SPICE2 that are often asked for.

There are many commercial SPICE simulators (PSPICE, NgSPICE, HSPICE, ...) which are derived from the Berkeley SPICE or are in some relation to it. Netlists of such SPICE derivatives can differ from Berkeley SPICE3 netlists. This has to be taken into account if netlists (their parameter names) are used with this package.