Analysis of Multiconductor Transmission Lines, 2nd Edition

APPENDIX B

A SPICE (PSPICE) TUTORIAL

This is a brief summary of the SPICE, or its personal computer version PSPICE, electric circuit analysis program. SPICE is an acronym for simulation program with integrated-circuit emphasis. The original SPICE computer program was developed to analyze complex electric circuits, particularly integrated circuits. It was developed at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1970s. Since it was developed under U.S. government funding, it is not proprietary and can be freely copied, used, and distributed. We will discuss the most common and widely available SPICE2, version G6 code, which was written in FORTRAN. This was written for use on large mainframe computers of the time. In the 1980s, the MicroSim Corporation developed a personal computer version of SPICE called PSPICE. A number of important modifications were made particularly in the plotting of data via the .PROBE function. Since then a number of commercial firms have modified and developed their own PC versions' but essentially the core engine is that of the original SPICE code. The MicroSim version of PSPICE was acquired by the OrCAD Corporation, now Cadence Design Systems. A windows-based version is available free from www.orcad.com. The latest is the version 10.0 called OrCAD Capture, which contains the primary simulation code PSPICE A/D. The OrCAD Capture program was originally called Schematic in the MicroSim version. A number of books [1–5] detail the use of SPICE and ...