Looking back at the PSpice Hack Chat event
Event held on: March 30th
Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io platform In this Hack Chat, we discussed:
- The challenges of system-level simulation
- Improving reliability, yield, and productivity of circuit design
- The issues with Spice simulation etc.
Here are a few feature Q&A from the chat session:
Q. Why I would choose PSpice vs any free simulator available in the market?
Q. Any suggestion about microcontroller, processor and FPGA simulations? for microcontroller its fin we can rig up the circuit >> generate part and use it as a library for simulation but any suggestion for fpga?
A. You can use PSpice Device Modeling Interface to model digital functional logic using high level language C/C++ and simulate with rest of PSpice circuit.
Q. Can I save the probe display with some settings, and restore it in next session?
A. Yes - In PSpice probe, you can create any combinations of plot windows, and save the display with a name of your choice. You can load it from the Display Control menu later - it is saved in a prb file at the same location as the dat file. It can also be used to save measurements. e.g. Create a measurement - bandwidth of a trace . save it as a display. In the next run, PSpice will load the dat file, and automatically evaluate and show the saved measurements.
Q. Does PSpice have any motor and/or electromechanical models?
A. Yes. PSpice comes with set of DC motor models and models for several other electromechanical components like Relay, Tacho, flywheel, gearbox, viscosity etc. In addition, you can also co-simulate any MATLAB automotive models with PSpice
Q. MATLAB- PSpice? What's the integration about?
A. MATLAB-PSpice interface - also called SLPS - allows PSpice models to be simulated from inside a Simulink model.
So you could start with an algorithmic model in SLPS, then move some of the blocks to transistor-level implementation in PSpice, and simulate the entire system together.
Q. Is spice simulation used in circuits that is almost exclusives digital and if so how do you model a simulation like that if most modern ICs are black boxes?
A. No Spice simulation not for digital. You can simulate almost anything. It is mostly used for Analog. You can model/simulate black box - if you know Transfer function or input out characteristics. take the example of switching or PWM controller - No manufacture publishes actual implementation - they just provide functional block and people do model and simulate such IC using datasheet only, no internal details like circuit diagram. PSpice support ABM and C language as modeling language - which enables you to model a black box device based on input/output characteristics.
Q. What about Monte Carlo simulations, for example to test performance over component tolerances?
A. Yes. You can perfrom MC analysis. It is so easy to do in PSpice. You simply define glocal or local tolerances and hit run. You can pick any output node after analysis is run and find out the effect. No need to run again for checking diferent nodes. PSpice Advance Analysis further offers you superior capabilities over and above what is offered by regular Spice simulators.
View the full transcript of the conversation here
