QUCS-S: Return Of The OpenSouce!

Another Linux user open wound: For ages I have been stuck without proper circuit simulation in Linux. I don’t define myself a power-user (only as a super user, but only when I run sudo) as I run Ubuntu, but that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve a powerful circuit simulator on my PC!

Up until today, I have been running QUCS. Way back when, where I started using this platform, I had issues with the spice import capabilities they supply. Already then I found that QUCS uses it’s own simulation engine. The crowd should shout why!?! Spice, even it’s still-open-source versions, has been under development for about as long as we had text interfaces to work with, why not bridge ye-ol’e engine to the beautiful GUI built by the QUCS development team? So somebody did (Vadim and Mike, You rock!). It’s a nasty looking text-file-based bridge between QUCS and ngspice, but it works, plain and simple. The installation took a bit of hassle, as usual. Since I already had QUCS pre-built with all of it’s pre-requisites, the only issue I had was building ngspice manually, rather than using the existing Ubuntu package. This also kept me up to date with the latest ngspice version, and allowed me to activate the XSPICE feature, critical for more advance SPICE code commands, i.e. poly.

I built with the following lines

../configure –with-x –enable-xspice –with-readline=yes –disable-debug
make
make install

Now there is a new block available in the QUCS intefrace, under the file components entry, called SpiceLibComp. All you need to do is point to the .lib file and the correct .SUBCKT entry in the file, and you are good!

That’s it, now you can simulate any spice module using QUCS, along with most of the previous components.

If you are having issues with installing this, feel free to contact me.

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