An Introduction to Circuit Simulation

LTspice, developed by Analog Devices, is a powerful, fast, and free SPICE simulator, schematic capture, and waveform viewer with a large database of components supported by SPICE models from all over the world. Drawing a schematic in LTspice is easy and fast. Thanks to its powerful graphing features, you can visualize the voltages and currents in a circuit, and also the power consumption of its components and much more.

This book is about learning to design and simulate electronic circuits using LTspice. Among others, the following topics are treated:

• DC and AC circuits
• Signal diodes and Zener diodes
• Transistor circuits including oscillators
• Thyristor/SCR, diac, and triac circuits
• Operational amplifier circuits including oscillators
• The 555 timer IC
• Filters
• Voltage regulators
• Optocouplers
• Waveform generation
• Digital logic simulation including the 74HC family

SPICE modeling LTspice is a powerful electronic circuit simulation tool with many features and possibilities. Covering them all in detail is not possible in a book of this size. Therefore, this book presents the most common topics like DC and AC circuit analysis, parameter sweeping, transfer functions, oscillators, graphing, etc. Although this book is an introduction to LTspice, it covers most topics of interest to people engaged in electronic circuit simulation.

The book is aimed at electronic/electrical engineers, students, teachers, and hobbyists. Many tested simulation examples are given in the book. Readers do not need to have any computer programming skills, but it will help if they are familiar with basic electronic circuit design and operation principles. Readers who want to dive deeper can find many detailed tutorials, articles, videos, design files, and SPICE circuit models on the Internet.

All the simulation examples used in the book are available as files at the webpage of this book. Readers can use these example circuits for learning or modify them for their own applications.