A question to the software engineers. Coming from other software that has shall we say ‘more developed’ simulation features, I was wondering if anyone on staff might comment as to how the simulation part of Kicad is coming along. I’d like to see a few DMM’s, a scope, and other handy digital test equipment available on the sim package. Also a DC nodes mode displaying all DC voltages at once would be handy. Perhaps real time operation would be nice too. All this similar to Tina, PADS, Multisim…
Any comment on this? What are the next upgrades planned for the simulator portion?
KiCad has simply integrated ngspice, so it depends on where ngspice is going.
Simulation is hard to deal with because opensource compatible device models are few in number. Most “freeware” simulators specifically forbid using their models elsewhere.
Well, I disagree here a little. KiCad has integrated the shared ngspice library. The caller, i.e. Eeschema, is responsible for (nearly) all user interfacing (plotting, measuring, netlist setup …). The data asked for by SK-II are provided by ngspice, the caller has to handle them.
Of course there will be improvements in the simulator itself, and I have been using the feedback from this list. But I agree, there is room for improvement.
Concerning models, people are borrowing from LTSPICE. Is that o.k.? We have to check it. The semiconductor vendors offer PSPICE-compatible models. They may be used by ngspice and thus KiCad. Special spice model libraries for KiCad, that is another item somebody has to organize.
LTSpiceVII said “Linear Technology Corporation owns the software. You may not modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the software executable(s) or models of LTC products provided.”, so bundling LTSpice derived models in KiCad packages is not allowed, unless KiCad gets specific permission from the owner.
If KiCad users then take models from LTSpice or TINA, that is not KiCads problem.
