MacSpice for Mac
Electronic circuit simulator.
Free
In English
Version 3.3.4When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
MacSpice overview
MacSpice is an electronic circuit simulator. Circuit simulation is a way of building and testing virtual models of electronic devices. It is usually cheaper and quicker to simulate a design than to build a prototype. MacSpice uses a text-file 'netlist' description of the circuit as input. This is a list of components and the nodes they connect to. Users may prepare netlists with a text editor, or derive them from a circuit diagram using a third-party schematic-capture application. MacSpice then builds a numerical model of the circuit and analyses this.
A command interpreter (shell) is used to specify the types of analyses that are required and how the results should be processed, saved or displayed. The high quality of the MacSpice command interpreter makes the automation of tasks straightforward.
MacSpice 3.2 runs natively on Mac computers with 64-bit Intel or Apple silicon processors. It is compatible with Berkeley Spice 3f5 but incorporates many improvements - from simple bug-fixes to entirely new commands, algorithms and solution strategies. For example: the memory leaks that affected Spice 3f4 have been cured; new algorithms have been developed to facilitate the simulation of large circuits, and to reduce simulation time; MacSpice provides a robust multi-parameter optimizer and facilities for inter-process communication with other applications.
What’s new in version 3.3.4
Enhancements:
- Generalise evaluation of variables to include cases such as: $$foo, $foo$bar and ${${pre}${post}}.
- New 'elif condition' control structure statement to simplify nested if-else-end logic in scripts.
- Addtional warnings about empty parts of an if-elif-else-end block.
- Issue a warning/error when 'shift' is called with negative number argument.
- 'Check for Updates...' mechanism (Sparkle) updated to version 2.7.1 (modified).
Bugs Fixed:
- The show and showmod commands did not match their descriptions in the User's Guide.
- Regression: Incorrect behaviour of $N, a syntactic sugar variant of $argv[N].
- Attempts to reference non-existent elements of scalar variables, e.g. $history[2], were not reported as errors.
- Use of '?' as the first character of a variable name was untrapped.
- The cdump command skips else blocks.
Technical Improvements:
- Refactor cp_xxx variables repesenting characters from 'extern' to 'static const' types.
- Refactor 'cp_evloop()' and supporting functions in front.c
- Replace 'CLImessage()'-based error messaging with CLImessagef().
- Move 'extern SPICEdev *DEVices[];' declarations to the 'defdefs.h' #include file.
- Make 'lookup3()' detect endianess explicitly.
- Change 'wl_free(ptr)' to 'wl_pfree(&ptr)' so freed ptr's are always set to nil.
- Replace remaining calls to [NSTextView insertText:] with [NSTextInputClient insertText:replacementRange:].
- Remove unnecessary (historical) 'islower()' and 'isupper()' checks.
MacSpice for Mac
Free
In English
Version 3.3.4
Write a detailed review about MacSpice
(4 Reviews of MacSpice)
Comments
User Ratings
Sep 3 2010
Version: 2.10.26
A huge, huge thanks to Mr. Williams for his continuing work in developing, documenting, improving, and supporting Spice on the Mac.
Jan 31 2005
Version: 3f5 2.8
Works just as I hoped, and let me finish a homework problem just now that would have otherwise required me to take a twenty minute trip to the lab.
Only thing that could be improved is better documentation - as in, easy-to-read PDF files written by a knowledgeable engineer. I'm trying to do some stuff with diodes and am at a little loss as to how to accurately represent them. I know this program is designed for people already familiar with spice, though, so I can't fault the program much.
Great job! And freeware?! You win the prize for best software of my day!
Dec 11 2003
Version: 3f5 R6
This is the best program out there for you engineering majors. The alternative--get the emulator VPC 6.0 and a cup of coffee, then wait for your simulations to run.