gEDA-user: TwoStageAmp example

[Patrick Doyle]

On 4/2/07, al davis <ad136 at freeelectron.net> wrote:
> On Monday 02 April 2007 12:44, Patrick Doyle wrote:
> > I'll take a look at that. I read on Stuart's web page that
> > ngspice "experienced a burst of development during 2004, and
> > incorporates a number of new patches which have increased its
> > stability and augmented its feature set, and is therefore the
> > preferred open-source SPICE (for now)." So I started by
> > looking there.
> >
> > I was probably a little scared away from gnucap since it
> > didn't have "spice" in its name :-)
>
> Spectre  and Nanosim don't have spice in the name either, yet
> they are the preferred commercial simulators among those in the
> know.
>
Speaking as one who is not in the know, I have often heard things like
"I took their circuit, spiced it, changed a couple of components, and
it worked like a charm", or "spice models for our parts are available
on our web site".  So I assumed that spice was the way to go.  Also,
when I googled "gnucap", the first site that popped up was
www.gnu.org, which listed version 0.31, released on March 26, 2002 as
the latest version.  So once again, I was scared away.

I'll try not to be so frightened now, but your warning about a lack of
beginner documentation does give me a little trepidation, and I'm
worried about losing the 4 hours and 13 minutes of experience I have
gained with ngspice, but I expect I'll survive.

I am mainly interested in using the tool to do some circuit
prototyping on a virtual benchtop.  If I can draw the schematic with
gschem, netlist it with gnetlist (presumably with the "spice-sdb"
backend?), and simulate it with gnucap, I'm just has happy to learn
that as I am to learn ngspice.

If I'm still thinking "old school" here, then please feel free to
point me in the more state-of-the-art direction.

Thanks...

--wpd