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Spice Girls Reunion at the 2012 Olympics, telling us what they really, really want
SPICE (sometime spelled "Spice") is a general purpose analog circuit simulator that is used to predict transient and steady-state circuit behavior (as opposed to S-parameters or other microwave-related behaviors). Spice is an acronym for "simulation program for integrated circuits emphasis". Spice is to the time domain as linear simulators are to the frequency domain. It can simulate voltage transient behavior, but accuracy is best if you use it below microwave frequencies. Thus in microwave circuits, Spice is typically used to simulate rise and fall times of modulator circuits, linear voltage regulator noise rejection, switched mode power supplies, etc.
Spice typically allows you to look at lumped element components only. If transmission lines are a significant part of your Spice analysis, you might have to model them with a lumped element transmission line model. Parasitic elements that can be expressed as lumped elements are easy to include in Spice analysis.
Here's a video that covers DC-DC converter design using Spice with some EM analysis thrown in.
IBIS Open Forum maintains a standard of sorts for Spice files, you can find it on their web site.
History of Spice
Spice was originally developed at the Electronics Research Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley in 1975.
PSpice is the PC version of Spice.
Spice links
There are a zillion web sites that will give you information on Spice, just google "spice analysis" and you'll see.
Free download
This suggestion came from Fred. Thanks!
QUCS is an open source digital , RF and microwave circuit simulation program that may be of some help to others in the RF field. Its full name is "Quite Universal Circuit Simulator". The great thing is it is FREE and quite powerful. Download it ...... and play with it......there are a large selection of examples available. It has a nice GUI, user friendly, and step by step tutorials. There are Linux, Mac and Windows versions. It's available on sourceforge.
You can find more fee EDA software on our "free EDA software" page!
So are many other versions of Spice.