Introduction

LTspice is a analog circuit simulator with integrated schematic capture and waveform viewer. It was explicitly written to outperform analogous tools for sale from software companies in the interest of being used for in-house IC design as part of Linear Technology Corporation's competitive advantage as a semiconductor company. This is a reasonable strategy despite the plethora of existing commercial SPICE offerings. At least I think so, speaking from benefit of the perspective of having written physical simulators for some decades, I see the best simulators developed by the concerns that actually need them and not software companies.

Now, what is unusual about LTspice is that is it also freely distributed in the interest of allowing potential customers to simulate LTC products in a faster simulator. Further, the freely distributed version is not crippled to limit its capability in the hope that it will be useful.

This is a unique situation for a SPICE simulator and has made LTspice's popularity fantastic. LTspice is overwhelmingly the most widely distributed and used SPICE program in the industry to date. It has become the de facto standard SPICE program.

I was grateful to do this Mac OS X edition. Self-authoring assembly language generated dynamically during the simulation(pioneered in the PC LTspice IV edition) proved to be even more advantageous in x64 than legacy x86. Finally, I need to thank Chris Driggett for his outstanding mentoring regarding application development for the Apple environment.

--Mike Engelhardt / 2013