Paolo Nenzi, Dietmar, Holger Vogt and Robert Larice have contributed to the enhanced stability with the new ngspice rework 20 release. ngspice rework 20 has already been pushed to fedora stable repositories with the following enhancements:
- Model names can start with a number like 1N4001
- .global command reinstated (was disabled)
- Error messages now display line number of input deck
- [feature]: .measure with tran, ac and dc (not yet complete, e.g DERIV is missing)
- [feature]: sysinfo command added
- [device]: Updated bsim4 model to BSIM 4.6.5
- [device]: Added PWL functionality for B sources
Currently Holger Vogt is kindly looking after my variable instantiation feature request for the .measure command. Hopefully after some testing, we can push another release to the stable repositories so that fedora users can largely benefit from it as soon as possible. I will write another blog post to demonstrate how to use this small but valuable feature.
Al Davis, who is working behind gnucap, is considering system-c plugins for gnucap, probably without their run-time package. Gnucap provides a lot of the needed run time support already. It might be all that is needed is to map the interface. That said, we will have to update fedora gnucap package to the latest development snapshots with the help of Rakesh Pandit (current fedora gnucap maintainer). This will give fedora users the chance to use gnucap plugins and latest enhancements over the current 0.35 stable repositories. This deserves another blog post 
.
Arun Sag is working on pushing some emacs mode to the fedora repositories. Among these emacs modes, there are irsim-mode and and spice-mode (see the above screenshot). Many users will enjoy the look-and-feel on their fedora emacs. I’m taking the opportunity to remind Fedora users that irsim has stuck-at fault simulation and power estimation capabilities.
Filed under: eda, emacs, fedora, Free Electronic Lab, gnucap, ngspice
Chitlesh Goorah
