Free electronic circuit simulators.
The following free circuit simulators are available from electronic component manufacturers.
- LTspice this comes from Analog Devices and is the most widely used,
- Qspice comes from Qorvo,
- MPLAB Mindi, comes from Microchip it is based on the symmetrix/simplis simulators,
- Infineonspice, it won't surprise you to hear that it comes from Infineon.
And these free simulators are not from component manufacturers.
Two of them, that is NGspice/Kicad, and QUCS, are available under a GPL (General Public license), they have been developed by a group of people rather than a commercial company.
- NGspice/Kicad, Its best to download NGspice as part of the KiCad package in order to get the graphical circuit input from KiCad, KiCad is a free PCB layout tool.
- QUCS has diverged into several different offerings, which I am finding a bit confusing, it claims to optimised for RF simulation.
- Micro-cap, came from a software company that went bust, at which point Micro-cap become freely available.
- Berkeley Spice, this is where it all began, I seem to remember Berkeley spice was developed in the 1960s, all the other versions of spice are based on this.
Note that I have not listed any simulators which you have to buy, or simulators that are not freely available to the amateur community.