Modeling Home Heating Systems With Circuit Simulation Software

Electricity flow is generally invisible, silent, and not something that most humans want to touch, so understanding how charge moves around can be fairly unintuitive at first. There are plenty of a…

Simulate A Better Termination

If you are making certain precision measurements, you know you need to terminate the connections with the right impedance, normally 50 ohms. Proper termination minimizes reflections on the line whi…

Kitchen Steganography With Turmeric

It is a classic rite of passage for nerdy kids to write secret messages using lemon juice. If you somehow missed that, you can’t see the writing until you heat the paper up with, say, an old-…

QSPICE Picks Up Where LTSpice Left Us

[Mike Engelhardt] is a name that should be very familiar to the hardcore electronics nerd. [Mike] is the developer responsible for LTSpice, which is quite likely the most widely used spice-compatib…

Modeling A Guitar For Circuit Simulation

Guitar effects have come a long way from the jangly, unaltered sounds of the 1950s when rock and roll started picking up steam. Starting in large part with [Jimi Hendrix] in the 60s, the number of …

An Open-Source, Free Circuit Simulator

The original circuit simulation software, called the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, or SPICE as it is more commonly known, was originally developed at the University of Califo…

Practical Inductors In LTSpice

LTSpice and the underlying Spice engine does a great job of simulating ideal components. But it is also capable — if you know how — of handling models of real-world devices. Inductors, …

Freq Out With LTSpice

We always enjoy [FesZ’s] videos, and his latest about FREQ function in LTSpice is no exception. In fact, LTSpice doesn’t document it, but it is part of the underlying Spice system. So, …

IBIS Models Explained

If you’ve worked with circuit simulation, you may have run into IBIS models. The acronym is input/output buffer information, and while you can do a lot without having to deal with IBIS, knowi…

OpenSPICE: A Portable Python Circuit Simulator

[Roman Parise] and [Georgios Is. Detorakis] have created OpenSPICE a fork of the PySpice project, adding a new simulation engine written entirely in Python. This enables the same PySpice simulation…

30 Free Circuit Simulators Lightly Reviewed

We live in a time where great software is available with the click of a mouse, often for free or — at least — low cost. But there’s a problem: how do you select from so many alter…