SPICEstyle

SPICEstyle is a collection of conventions, practices, and tooling intended to govern the authoring of SPICE netlists and related simulation workflows. It aims to improve readability, consistency, and reproducibility across simulations and projects. The concept emerged in open-source electronics communities in the early 2020s as a community-driven effort to complement existing simulators such as ngspice, HSPICE, and Spectre by providing common stylistic guidelines rather than a formal standard. SPICEstyle covers naming conventions for components and subcircuits, hierarchical organization of netlists, explicit unit usage, and consistent commenting practices to document assumptions and models.

It also prescribes file organization, including a primary netlist, a library of subcircuits, model definitions, and separate test benches. The style favors modular designs with clearly defined interfaces, parameterization of values, and explicit temperature and process parameters where applicable. A central goal is portability, so SPICEstyle discourages simulator-specific constructs unless necessary and recommends substitution with portable equivalents when possible.

Tooling under SPICEstyle typically includes a netlist formatter, a linter that flags stylistic and unit inconsistencies, and a preprocessor that can expand macros or harmonize parameters across subcircuits. Some implementations provide a small test harness for automated regression testing, enabling reproducible runs and comparison of results across simulators. Adoption varies by community, with educational projects and some hobbyist teams citing improved collaboration and reduced onboarding time.

Critics note that SPICEstyle cannot resolve fundamental differences between simulators and models, and that the diversity of SPICE dialects can limit universal application. Nevertheless, supporters view it as a practical step toward clearer, more maintainable SPICE workflows. See also SPICE, netlist, ngspice, HSPICE.