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Editing Netlists, Running the Simulation

If you have already entered a schematic of your circuit then clicking on the 'Capture' button in the toolbar will automatically create a basic netlist, which you can edit in the netlist editor just below the schematic, to add analysis commands or do whatever other modifications you want to do before running the simulation. To create a netlist from scratch just start typing in the netlist editor. (If you are new to SPICE or Gnucap, you can view an online SPICE manual here or download the printable manuals of both Gnucap and SPICE from the MacInit website.) To edit an existing netlist file you can either open the file chooser (File->Open) and browse your computer or drag the file onto an open window or the dock icon.

To improve readability the lines are colored according to the following schema:

analysis commandsdark red
PRINT statementsorange
model definitionsdark yellow
title, end, commentsgrey
subcircuit headerblue
everything elsedark blue

When you have finished editing the netlist you can run the simulation by clicking the Analyze button in the window's toolbar. The default circuit simulator is SPICE. You can change it to Gnucap or to a custom SPICE-compatible simulator in the Simulator sub-panel of the preferences panel. Gnucap and SPICE commands are very similar but Gnucap does not yet support all SPICE commands and has an additional command set of its own. So always keep in mind that a Gnucap file does not necessarily work with SPICE, and vice versa.

The data, resulting from the analysis, will appear in the bottom text area. Any warnings or errors that occur during the simulation will also be displayed there. You will only see the data for the analysis variables which you have explicitly specified with the PRINT command. Please refer to the user manuals of SPICE and Gnucap to learn more about the PRINT command.

Note: MI-SUGAR only loads files with the extensions cir, ckt or sugar. Files with other extensions will be rejected.