Hi, I am trying to simulate a basic nfet circuit however, I am not sure why nothing happens when I click the Simulate button. I am trying to do transient analysis however nothing happens. I have also attached the spice file. I think it should be importing the .lib file for sky130 transistor models but it is not doing so. I have to do that manually and run ngspice manually from the terminal to make it work.

Add a lne in the STIMULI code block:

.lib /path/to/share/pdk/sky130A/libs.tech/ngspice/sky130.lib.spice tt

By nothing I mean no window opens up or no error message box opens up. If I look in the terminal I see "Simulation started"

Ensure you have the xterm terminal emulator program installed (

sudo apt install xterm

) it is a small package and it is a well working terminal emulator. Xschem uses by default

xterm

when launching ngspice. Ngspice is run inside a terminal so after simulation is completed you may give additional commands to ngspice and see the error/warning messages. Of course you can use any terminal emulator with xschem (like gnome-terminal etc, see

terminal

in xschemrc) but since most "modern" desktop environment terminals are half broken I suggest to use xterm. Simulation results are saved by default into

~/.xschem/simulations

, however you can change the location by changing the

netlist_dir

variable in xschemrc. You can also set variable

local_netlist_dir

to 1 (

set local_netlist_dir 1

) so the netlists will be automatically saved into the directory containing the schematic, in a

simulation/

folder. If you use xschem interactively by giving tcl commands you may do something like:

set netlist_dir [xschem get current_dirname]/spice; xschem netlist

to have the netlist saved into a

spice/

folder into the directory containing the current schematic (this directory is not necessarily the current directory, like 'pwd'). You can also add:

set netlist_dir {}

in your xschemrc. This will set it to an empty value, forcing xschem to ask you to choose a netlist directory the first time you want to generate a netlist.

@Stefan Schippers Thanks for the detailed help. Upon doing

echo $TERM

I got

xterm-256color

which means I am using xterm

to investigate the issue see the video.