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1 Preface

The NGSPICE user's manual is based on the text file included in the Spice3f source package. The original text has been converted to TeXInfo format by Emmanuel Rouat and Arno W. Peters.

The original text has been modified and extended to reflect the changes between plain Spice3f5 and NGSPICE. Some of the "changes" comes from the HTML documentation Charles D.H. Williams has written and published on his web site.

This manual covers the double role of being an introductory text for the novice user who wants to learn how to use spice (and thus NGSPICE), and a reference text for the expert who wants to identify the differences between the original spice3f code (sometimes referred as the Berkeley's Spice) and the NGSPICE code.

Since NGSPICE is an Open Source software, one chapter describing program compilation and compilation options have been added to the original text. Since its birth, spice3f had many compilation switches that enabled/disabled some features considered experimental or troublesome. In a "perfect world", most of these switches would be implemented as runtime options, thus allowing users to activate/deactivate the features they want without recompiling the source. Anyway time is never sufficient to implement all the features and, in the end, this is not a "perfect world".

Trying to keep a record of the "long" history of this piece of software, an entire chapter has been dedicated to the description of the patches publicly made available in the past years through USENET newsgroups.

As always, errors, omissions and unreadable phrases are only my fault.

Paolo Nenzi

Roma, March 24th 2001

Indeed. At the end of the day, this is engineering, and one learns to live

within the limitations of the tools.

Kevin Aylward , Warden of the Kings Ale