Re: Free electronics simulation software

Helmut,

I tried to post this information previously but it doesn't seem to
have taken. My coworker tried one more circuit from the list since
then.

We can't provide the original circuits we used, but we found some on
the web called MCNC which are supposed to be SPICE benchmark
circuits. The three simulators tested were PSpice Ver 9, Micro-Cap 9,
and LTSpice 2.20k. I know PSpice is an older version but the guys who
use it love it and don't want to upgrade to the creature that Cadence
has created. Both PSpice and Micro-Cap are professional versions not
student versions. For the system we did this on, both Micro-Cap and
LTSpice were fresh installs so everything was defaulted. We set
PSpice back to its default conditions as best we could. We chose
circuits randomly from the set while ignoring the huge ones since we
can't put too much time into this. In each simulator, we just loaded
the circuit and simulated. That's all. The results were:

SQRT.CIR
PSpice - 100.98s
Micro-Cap - 99.06s
LTSpice - 207.046s

AROM.CIR
PSpice - 8.11s
Micro-Cap - 4.41s
LTSpice - 10.25s

ADD32.CIR
PSpice - 609.53s
Micro-Cap - 868.70s
LTSpice - 1917.749s

MUX8.CIR
PSpice - 15.06s
Micro-Cap - 7.52s
LTSpice - 15.25s

I must be missing some setting to change in LTSpice but this is how it
installs.

Alex

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