LTspice Circuit Simulator by Analog Devices
2024-11-06, RB
LTspice is a electrical circuit simulation tool from Analog Devices. It runs on Windows and macOS. The respective LTspice installers are provided on the LTspice Information Center of Analog Devices.
On Linux LTspice can be executed by means of the Wine compatibility layer to run Windows software on Linux (and macOS). The concept of Wine is explained on Wikipedia.
This excellent LTspice on Linux Howto explains how to install and run LTspice (64 bit for Windows) on Linux by means of Wine.
Manuals and Tutorials
Switcher CAD 3 manual, the last official manual by Linear Technology of the LTSpice IV predecessor. Mostly used as reference.- Great tutorial by Gunthard Kraus (part 1), e.g. lossy transmission lines, S-parameters, filters, …
- RF Special Edition: Complete Simulation of a 137MHz Weather Satellite Converter using LTspice IV by Gunthard Kraus (part 2)
- LTspice IV Getting Started Guide, presentation
Selected Topics
Voltage Controlled Switch
- LTSpice - Voltage Controlled Switch (youtube video)
Parameter Sweep
A short tutorial is the LTSpice Parameter Sweep Tutorial by Andrew Herdrich, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Portland State University, January 7, 2007, Version 2. The examples below are taken from that tutorial.
Parameters and parameter sweep are defined by directives (commands starting with at dot).
Constant parameter:
.param C=1uF
Common loop expression, e.g. to test capacitors from 1μF to 10μF in 2μF steps:
.step param C 1uF 10uF 2uF
Parameters from a list:
.step param C list 0.47uF 1uF 2.2uF 10uF
Logarithmic (common log, base 10) parameter variation, e.g. 8 steps from 100nF to 1uF:
.step dec param C 100nF 1uF 8
AC Sweep (Creates Bode Plot)
logarithmic (base 10) AC sweep from 1 Hz to 100kHz with 10 steps per decade:
.ac dec 10 1 100k
Photovoltaics (PV) Modelling with LTspice
As part of the lecture Physics1 / Electrical Engineering (aka Physics: Electricity and Magnetism) we use LTspice to model PV modules.