On Thursday 14 May 2009, Joerg wrote: > AFAIK Gnucap is not quite SPICE-compatible, but that's what > your students will be facing when they head out into > industry. LTSpice might be an alternative. Very short > learning curve, free of cost, nice graphics output and by now > very widespread in industry.
It depends which spice. Strictly, SPICE is not SPICE compatible, because if you move to a different one something will be different. I get the impression that what you want is bug-for-bug compatibility. From a beginners perspective, the important differences between Gnucap and any particular Spice are usually that Gnucap has extra capability that the Spice doesn't have, and this extra capability is useful to a beginner. >From the viewpoint of undergraduate education, it is as close as any, and provides an experience closer to the high-end simulators than the PC spice's do. It has a shorter learning curve that the real Spice from Berkeley, and a smoother learning curve than the graphic commercial and cover-crop spice's. The popular graphic PC spice's carry you part way in luxury, then dump you when you really need it. The PC graphic spice's only provide a short learning curve if you already are comfortable with the typical project baggage. Then if you want to play, to do more than what you can do with a few kick buttons, you need to start over. Educators typically use simulators very poorly, as if they themselves don't understand. In most cases, the total use is a few specified runs with a couple of graphs, that you do after everything else is done. A more appropriate use of simulators is to explore things that you can't see with real measurements. There is a lot that you can find out about a circuit that you can't measure in a practical way. Students need to learn to be flexible, and they need to learn to use computers effectively, not just by kicking the GUI a few times. EE's, even analog designers, need to learn some serious programming. Too many schools don't do this. In the extreme case, EE could become a dumping ground for students who can't make it in CS. Is that what you want? _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user