SPICE is a general-purpose, open-source analog electronic circuit simulator. It stands for Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis. ngspice is a successor, and is easily installable on Linux. It’s the simulator I’ve used to explore the Skywater 130 PDK.

Here’s an example spice simulation file that I used to simulate the inverter I drew.

And here’s a nice demo of me showing how a flip-flop works by simulating a Sky130 D type flip flop with SPICE.

Course feedback

I’d absolutely recommend this course even if you've never done hardware design. We all have a phone with a couple of gigahertz worth of compute power in our hands but I don't think many people know exactly how that works.

Fran Gonzalez (digital course)