Simulation eBook - About naming conventions

About naming conventions

Before going any further it is important to understand the naming conventions used throughout this book and throughout all the simulations.

Unless stated otherwise, text in Spice simulations is case insensitive.

Permissible characters are: a to z, numbers 0 to 9 and the underscore character: _.

Fields on a line are separated by one or more blanks, a comma, an equal (=) sign, or a left or right parenthesis; extra spaces are ignored.

A line may be continued by entering a + (plus) in column 1 of the following line; LTspice continues reading beginning with column 2.

A name field must begin with a letter (A through Z) and cannot contain any delimiters.

A number field may be an integer field (12, -44), a floating point field (3.14159), either an integer or floating point number followed by an integer exponent (1e-14, 2.65e3), or either an integer or a floating point number followed by one of the following scale factors:

Suffix	Name	Factor
T	Tera	1e12
G	Giga	1e9
Meg	Mega	1e6
K	Kilo	1e3
mil	Mil	25.4×1e-6
m	milli	1e-3
u	micro	1e-6
n	nano	1e-9
p	pico	1e-12
f	femto	1e-15

Letters immediately following a number that are not scale factors are ignored and letters immediately following a scale factor are ignored. Hence, 10, 10V, 10Volts, and 10Hz all represent the same number, and M, MA, MSec, and MMhos all represent the same scale factor. Note that 1000, 1000.0, 1000Hz, 1e3, 1.0e3, 1kHz, and 1k all represent the same number.

• Note that M or m denote 'milli, i.e. 1e-3
• The suffix Meg MUST to be used for 1e6

Node names may either be plain numbers or arbitrary character strings, not starting with a number.

The ground node must be named 0 (zero). For compatibility reasons gnd is accepted as the ground node and will internally be treated as a global node and be converted to 0. LTspice and therefore, EasyEDA, requires that the following topological constraints are satisfied:

• Each circuit has to have a ground node (gnd or 0)!
• The circuit cannot contain a loop of voltage sources and/or inductors and cannot contain a cut-set (series connected set) of current sources and/or capacitors.
• Each node in the circuit must have a dc path to ground.
• Every node must have at least two connections except for transmission line nodes (to permit unterminated transmission lines) and MOSFET substrate nodes (which have two internal connections anyway).

These constraints will be covered in more detail later.