Quick look at QSPICE
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- Опубліковано 19 тра 2024
- #202 In this video I take a quick look at one of the newest free circuit simulators out there - Qspice. Its quite an interesting program with multiple features but before moving all your simulations over, it might be worth taking a look at some of its quirks.
Qspice download and further information: www.qorvo.com/design-hub/desi...
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finally cat pics in circuit simulation, what a time to be alive 👍
Yeah, but it has its drawbacks. Just check the size of the simulation file ... :)
But nowadays size isnt an issue, right?
@@markusreichel3896 Yes but time isnt. If you want to transfer it to a colleague by mail or by drive, you may notice it takes longer than it should.
To be completely honest, the C++ feature of QSpice really caught my eye. Being able to describe a component's behavior using code? Hell yeah!
A few years ago I had to design and implement a very sharp active audio filter for a home project. This was not something I was quite used to, and I wanted to test and compare several topologies in simulation.
I found it quite difficult to automate just about anything with GUI tools like that (used LTspice before), and I ended up driving a Xyce instance from python code with PySpice. Who needs a graphical interface, right?
The code project grew bigger and kinda became its own thing. Now if I want to synthesize, simulate and show a Bode plot for a high Q DABP or a 4th order Chebyshev LP with MFB topology and 3dB ripple, I can do that in 10 lines of code using my lib, and it's gonna give me optimal component values in the E-series of my choice.
It's certainly not a solution for everyone, but finding a way to interface Spice simulation with code can be very powerful.
This is insane, a massive upgrade coming from the actual creator. IMHO, it seems to be a quite seamless move from LTSpice.
Check out the “Bode” function too! You can use it to get bode plots of control loops as if you were using a frequency response analyzer
Have you tried the Bode example? The results do not look right
I spent weeks learning ltspice properly.
Not going through that rabbit hole again, for no apparent gain.
The biggest issue with Ltspice is just the super weird non-standard keyboard shortcuts. As soon as you change those to something every other program is using, it's not that bad. Just the interface is very very dated.
The ability to use C components is promising. I always wanted to do it on LTSpice, having to recreate the entire simulation on PSIM just for that.
@@diegolira- I agree, nowadays Linux support is a MUST. I hope QSpice works with wine at least..
I was in need for a review like this one. Thnx.
Looks a lot like QUCS which interfaces with NGspice
Thanks for the review. Much appreciated.
Looks more intuitive in certain areas than LT Spice. Good to get some progress in the space.
And very less intuitive in many other areas (like the total absence of dialogs)
I find it hard to believe there are no dialogs for editing the directives like LT Spice has. That seems like a large step backwards. How sure are we that they aren't perhaps activated by right click menu, or appear in a side-panel that you have to explicitly open?
I agree
Well, turns out there are indeed no dialogs or panels, seems like the author got a bee in his bonnet about all data to be entered direct into fields in the drawing. But maybe we can advocate for that to be fixed. Folks interested in QSPICE should in any case check out the author's intro video at ua-cam.com/video/8QVFJBlTieQ/v-deo.html , which is quite informative and mostly encouraging. But to the point at hand, see 5m17s or so (ua-cam.com/video/8QVFJBlTieQ/v-deo.html), followed up by the author unwittingly demonstrating the shortcoming of no dialogs at 6m40s.
And by the way Fes -- nice job as usual!
@@Graham_WidemanNo panels. Hmm that is not helpful even for experienced users. I don't always rememenber what a string of numbers denote.
I recommend review of QUCS, free and open source simulation SW, with very good open source community support.
QUCS didn't update for last 7 years and the last version is 0.0.19, which is not even 1.0.0
👍❤ KiCAD also has a build-in SPICE simulator. Just saying :) Also there are QUCS and QUCS-S.
yeah I'm more interested on a comparison with QUCS-S with ngSpice under it.
Its nice to see that theres improvement. The last time i used spice was in EWB / Electronics workbench that is now NI Multisim. But the cd required at every start got a scratch. It was gone at that point and i dislike the NI framework since its so much bloated. Likewise with Labview - its very powerful but just the installation takes a day, its such a pain to get going. But this looks like a step in the right direction. I always liked the simpler Falstad circuit sim for throwing something together to quickly prove a point and often used that one for the last decade. It also has its quirks, no cat pictures and other limits but works best for me.
Please do a video about dialog semi (renesas) GreenPak
Thanks
Good video. Can you do a video explaining how to create an inverter with a given CMOS technology and create symbol and run a simple simulation.
This will help many people start using qspice effectively.
Thank you in advance
This is a perfect overview of Qspice. There is a lot of uninformed or useless BS online, including from Qorvo. This video answered most of my questions and doubts, thanks! I have to admit I expected quite a list of bugs to be mentioned, however, the only slightly less positive comment is the lack of hints when entering dot commands? I can not follow that this is a problem at all for people seriously interested in SPICE. Also, that kind of hand-holding is also not in LTspice (it starts to creep in the newer releases and I wish I could turn it off).
For me the most important unanswered question still is if Qspice is *really* faster than LTspice? I have a hard time believing that. Another question is how well (and how) the Verilog/VHDL link works on the user level. My on-line experiments with PartQuest show that its VHDL-AMS is several times slower than SPICE. Of course that is no issue if an equivalent SPICE model does not exist. It would be nice to compare Qspice with the XSPICE part of NGSPICE (where models can be coded in C directly).
I mostly agree with your assessment. Yet the C++ functionality is interesting.
Concur on intrinsic math modeling of devices and subsystems in C++. Opens a whole new world of simulation with a much easier-to-use interface.
Hi Fez,
Will there be a video how to transfer an LTSPICE scheme under QSPICE?
I'm not sure that there is a direct transfer possible since the 2 programs use different file formats when saving the simulation; anyway, at the moment I do not plan on doing further Qspice related videos, maybe sometime in the future
MicroCap, I believe is the best free Spice simulator. Too bad the development has stopped
Nice overview. However, to use the C++ vs the NET files I need some turn-key learning videos. Then compare the QSPICE results to the real world circuit and also to LTspice. This QSPICE might be way to go? LTspice works well for hobby Op-Amp projects. 😎 Thank you. Adding New Components and testing seems like an important learning subject?
After using a few analog/digital logic simulators I can’t shake the feeling of being still in the 90s or early 2000. Come on, software IDEs are so nice, responsive, and easy on the eye (just take a look at any JetBrains IDE, VSC, Atom). Why can’t we have those interfaces in hardware design too ( Altium is exception. Besides their subscription model, everything is nice).
Has anybody tried to run the Bode Plot example? The bode plot doesn't look right.
What is your favorite circuit simulator?
😅 You know that...?
How to find tubes symbols for old triodes circuits? How to create a triod symbol? Or where are all symbol libraries to download?
It only runs on Windows? Can you make a Video about an open source Simulator like ngspice ore something? I am so done with stupid Windows OS.
Not so stupid that it does ah! ah!
LTSpice works fine under Wine. I think this would work under Wine as well. There are no proper alternatives under Linux that are this powerful and also don't have a community that's big enough to be able to find new models or share problems.
@@p_mouse8676 i have almost always graphic bugs with wine and i dont realy trust proprietary software. Even if its not a virus itselve, bad code can also create bad problems.
@@p_mouse8676 That's what we said about Blender, Gimp or Krita before they started to compete in features with the tools of large software editors.
Same story with Kicad, which is not as deep as the proprietary EDA softwares but still good enough for quite advanced designs that it became used in industry and grew a large community of both hobbyists and pros.
The big strength of LTspice is the collection of proprietary models collection they've embedded in. But pretty sure Analog Device's concurrents (especially those outside USA) would prefer to push for a more neutral tool to use their own spice models. And at some point we could even imagine TI ditching their own less popular spice fork to contribute directly to something like QUCS-S or ngspice.
Look at Arduino IDE : we don't need to be able to hunt for 3rd-party or community models when the tool is vendor-agnostic. And improved models can be directly embedded or easily distributed as add-on updates.
@@diegolira- and these days with the power of ARM systems it's quite a poor choice for such a big company to just cover x86 on Linux.
The quality of the underlying simulation between qspice and ltspice is different. Ltspice sometimes has trouble simulating circuits that have discontinuous behaviour. Qspice seems to handle this much better.
I was simulating a circuit with an opamp where I wanted to switch the input on after a time delay. Ltspice could not handle this transition. Qspice handled it easily.
That is already enough to make me want to use Qspice.
How does Qspice compare to ngspice, LTSpice, Hspice, Pspice? Seems the market is already saturated with SPICE programs.
QSpice will never have a MacOS version (for M1/M2) as the ARM architecture do not support extended floats used by QSpice nor will it ever have a true Linux version (other than a possible Wine version - and it might already work?). A native Linux version (Qt?) would require a complete UI rewrite and while certainly not impossible in theory the amount of work and the need to maintain two very different code tracks makes it practically impossible.
It would be helpful if the review did not just focus on some very shallow UI things (my thinking is that to use any Spice simulator getting an understanding of some basic commands, like ".tran" etc. just comes with the territory and is not a weakness of QSpice per se) . What would be interesting is for example the ability simulate more advanced circuits, stability, robustness as compared with other (e.g. LTSpice). Cases where for example LTSpice doesn't converge without a lot of manual "tricks" and whereby QSpice succeeds, and of course speed of simulation (its a big difference if it takes 30min vs. say, 3min even for only a semi-professional user. ). Of course, that is an enormous and time consuming exercise to find and compare such examples but for me the simulation engine is what matters and this review didn't touch anything at all on the core functionality.
TINA FTW !....cheers.
It feels and even looks a lot like LTSpice. The interface still looks and works horrible. Still very far from user friendly. Way to many complicated text based spice rules again. Why not a easy to understand menu for the user?
The extra models can be easily be imported from 3rd party sources anyway in LTSpice.
For now I see very little benefits, more just a ever so slightly different flavor.
BTW, subcircuits also works in LTSpice, except for the direct programming code.
I believe it's the same principle developer.
@@vincei4252 yes it is, but apparently he also didn't bother to change the approach either? It now literally feels just like a slightly different ltspice.
Of course 3rd party models and subckts can be imported into LTspice; but from what I know at least, you cannot link/import another schematic - the imported file will be a netlist (a text file), not a circuit - that can be viewed and edited as a circuit -> this was the difference I was trying to highlight.
@@FesZElectronics a component model or sub circuit IS exactly the same thing, just called differently. You can basically move any schematic into a component with just a few IO ports.
LTspice is far far far... better user friendly especially with its dialogue box for components values, I hate typing parameters with this QSpice
Qspice ltspice same developer.
I must make sure it works on windows 7 64 bit else is a No No for me. I am not interested in Win 8,10 or 11 or will ever likely want them.