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Well, yes. LTSpice is not for schematic capture. It's for simulation. If you have to do power supply design, LTSpice lets you almost get it right before you order parts.

Here's one of mine.[1] I built that, and it works pretty much the same as the simulation does. Except for the depletion-mode FET current limiter. The resistor that sets the current limit had to be adjusted after building to get the same current limit as the simulation.

LTSpice doesn't help with layout. I had to follow the layout instructions in the switcher control data sheet to get it to work. Some of those paths have to be very short.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ttyloopdriver/tree/master/circ...



> LTSpice is not for schematic capture. It's for simulation.

That may well be. IN that case, LTSpice would benefit greatly from being able to import the output of a proper schematic capture tool.

If LTSpice was OpenSource, that could be added in a day of work.

I love LTSpice, but the fact that

   1. the software sees very little updates over time

   2. it's closed source and all the cool shit that could be added to it by the community won't happen
is really a huge downer.


You usually use LTSpice only to simulate difficult analog parts of a circuit. Not the whole thing.

The important part is the device models that simulate components. Those do get updated as new analog ICs come out. It's finding a good model that's hard. Linear Technology keeps the models updated for their own parts, but you have to look around on the Web for many non-LT parts.




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