Click the image to get the sch-rnd sheet
In this simulation we are going to look at a single-transistor amplifier in the time domain to verify how it amplifies a sine wave.
The single-sheet schematic contains the amplifier, the voltage sources and the spice command symbol.
In the previous examples all components used were ideal: simple resistors, capacitors and sources, without any special characteristics or side effects. More complex components such as transistors typically have a large set of parameters that differ by device type. Spice addresses this by using models.
A model in spice is really two things:
The first of these, the code, is typically provided as part of the simulator software, at least for the most common, basic component types. The second of these, the set of model parameters, is specified by the user (normally acquired from the device vendor or derived from the datasheet or actual measurements).
In sch-rnd these models are kept in the spice library, which is very much like the symbol or devmap library: a directory tree that holds spice models, one model per file, with models identified by file name. Spice export files are self-contained and do not rely on external model files. This is achieved by sch-rnd copying the content of these spice model files from the library into the output file.
Furthermore there's a sheet-local library, just like with devmap (and optionally with symbols), so that any spice model used by the sheet is also saved within the sheet, keeping the sheet self-contained and portable.
This is the usual npn symbol from the stock symbol library shipped with sch-rnd. The devmap has been set to bc817_sot23 so that the sheet can also be used in a PCB workflow with a sot23 footprint as well.
The spice-specific aspects are the model and the spice pinout. The model is specified using the spice/model attribute, with value bc817. There is a file in the spice model library shipped with sch-rnd called bc817.prm. The pinout is set by the spice/pinnum terminal attributes. For the BJT spice model the pinout is always the same, so the stock library symbol has this attribute hardwired in terminals with a low priority (so that it can be overridden by other mechanisms).
The devmap file could contain the symbol's spice/model and portmap to set spice/pinnum for each terminal, but this is not a good idea because there may be different spice models for different complexities of simulation. Simple models, like bc817.prm, concentrate only on the core of the functionality, while more complex models implemented as "subcircuits" (subckt in spice slang) may add parasitic effects, such as pin inductances and pin/package related stray capacitances. Such complex models run slower, but may be more accurate in some cases, while the simpler model would cover most of the normal use cases. The user needs to decide which model to use for the given circuit or even the given simulation; accordingly, this should not be defined in the devmap.
Specifying the spice pinout from the devmap is unnecessary if both the model and the symbol use the standard spice BJT pinout that matches the model code in spice. However, for subcircuit models the pinout may differ, and sch-rnd offers multiple mechanisms to deal with different spice pinouts.
V1 is generating the input sine wave on the in network. The syntax for this is (see in V1's spice/params):
SINE(0 0.01 1k)
The first parameter is the (dc) voltage offset, the second is the AC amplitude voltage and the third is the frequency in Hz.
V2 is an 5V DC power supply for Vcc:
dc 5
It contains the following script:
tran 1u 10m plot v(out) v(in)
which runs the simulation for 10 mS, sampling it once a microsecond. At the end we are plotting the input and output voltages.
Running ngspice the usual way on the export yields the following graph:
Gnucap uses a different command syntax. Modify the spice command symbol's spice/command attribute to:
print tran v(out) v(in) tran 1u 10m > plot.txt
After the export, write the single word spice in the first line of the file (e.g. using a text editor), otherwise gnucap won't know the file is in spice syntax. Then run gnucap 10_btj_amp_tr.cir and it will dump a text table to plot.txt that can be plotted using a suitable utility, e.g. gnuplot.
The gnucap-modified schematic is also available.
TODO