In 1973, SPICE was introduced to the world by Professor
Donald O. Pederson of the University of California at Berkeley,
and a new era of computer-aided design (CAD) tools was born.
As its name implies, SPICE is a "Simulation Program with
Integrated Circuit Emphasis." You give it a description of an
electrical circuit, made up of resistors, capacitors, inductors,
and power sources, and SPICE will predict the performance of that
circuit. Instead of bread-boarding new designs in the lab,
circuit designers found they could optimize their designs on
computers–in effect, using computers to build better computers.
Since its introduction, SPICE has been commercialized
and released in a dozen variants, such as H-SPICE, P-SPICE,
and ADVICE.
Learn more about circuit simulation from the resources on this site,
listed below. You might even acquire a taste for SPICE by
running examples online.