SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a general-purpose analog electronic circuit simulator. It is a powerful program that is used in IC and board-level design to check the integrity of circuit designs and to predict circuit behavior. Integrated circuits, unlike board-level designs composed of discrete parts, are impossible to breadboard before manufacture.

Further, the high costs of photolithographic masks and other manufacturing prerequisites make it essential to design the circuit to be as close to perfect as possible before the integrated circuit is first built. Simulating the circuit with SPICE is the industry-standard way to verify circuit operation at the transistor level before committing to manufacturing an integrated circuit. Board-level circuit designs can often be breadboarded for testing.

Even with a breadboard, some circuit properties may not be accurate compared to the final printed wiring board, such as parasitic resistances and capacitances. These parasitic components can often be estimated more accurately using SPICE simulation. Also, designers may want more information about the circuit than is available from a single mock-up.

For instance, circuit performance is affected by component manufacturing tolerances. In these cases it is common to use SPICE to perform Monte Carlo simulations of the effect of component variations on performance, a task which is impractical using calculations by hand for a circuit of any appreciable complexity.

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