Re: LTspice

From: ldg (asfd_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/20/05 

Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 10:03:24 -0800

On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 16:58:47 GMT, "Mike Engelhardt" <nospam@spam.org>
wrote:

>More full licenses of
>LTspice are distribed per day than, say, PSpice/Schematic/
>Orcad does in a year.

And more are deleted :-)

Actually, LTspice seems to be getting slightly better, but is a board
level simulator. If that's you're purpose, then fine. If you're
doing IC's, it will soon disappoint.

It still doesn't seem to be able to handle simple hspice models for
resistors and capacitors. (specified by w/l). These are simple
things, but not needed for board level work.

I haven't tried using a multiplier ( m=) for bipolars, but this didn't
seem to work when I tried it a while back in a bandgap. A multiplier
isn't in the LTspice documentation for bipolars, so it's really not
there anyway. Again, if you're not doing a lot of device level work
using bipolars, this isn't too much of a problem. There are many
things like this you run into when trying to use LTspice for IC's.

So LTspice is a board level simulator with nice graphics. There are
many undocumented features in LTspice that people have reverse
engineered, but a user shouldn't have to do that.

I looked at Simetrix recently and they can't do m= (mutipliers) on
capacitors, so LTspice has them beat there. They have a native linux
version though and that sure is tempting.

Both LTspice and Simetrix run well on my AMD 64 box under SuSE9.2.

Ltspice really does run well under wine. I was impressed. I didn't
do benchmarks, so have no way of knowing at this point how the extra
overhead might affect a long simulation. What impressed me most I
think was the ease with which this software loaded and ran. As a new
linux administrator (used unix for years), I've struggled with getting
other software to run. Loading LTspice was a joy in comparison. 64
bits? No problem.

I tried recently to get ECS/Synario/Cohesion/Lakers_AMS schematic
capture to run under SuSE9.2. It's libraries are dependent on Redhat
V3 and gets glibc errors under SuSE.

Smartspice won't even let you try their software if you tell them you
have anything besides Redhat V3. They don't support anything else.
End of story. They're nice about it though :-)

Looks like I chose the wrong distro for my linux box. I'm going to
have to switch over to Redhat since that's what the engineering
software companies seem to have standardized on. From what I
understand the different distros use the same libraries, but have
arranged them differently? If true it makes one wonder if the word
duh means anything to these folks. Then again, why is it some vendors
seem to be able to write distro independent software for linux and
while others can't?

Regards,
Larry

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