It's Official... PSpice Schematics v10.3!

I am trying SuperSpice... my only complaint is that the interface is a bit clumsy if you're not using a high resolution.

Since I don't like high resolutions, this is a problem.

(Otherwise, SS is a very good tool. Congratulations!)

One interface I liked was the one from SIMetrix. Very fast and clean -- just has a very bad choice of keyboard shortcuts (F1-F12 keys for almost everything -- I'm used to CTRL+R or R everywhere for rotate), and those shortcuts can't be changed.

[]s

--
Chaos Master®, posting from Brazil.
"It\'s not what it seems, not what you think. No, I must be dreaming."

http://marreka.no-ip.com  | http://tinyurl.com/46vru 
http://renan182.no-ip.org | http://marreka.blogspot.com (in Portuguese)

I agree that you definitely want a big monitor set to high resolution. Up to a couple of weeks ago I was using a 17" at 1280 by 1024. I found this very acceptable. However, I now have a 19" set to 1600 by 1200, but he change was simply because my old monitor failed. It was only £100 so, today, monitor size should not be an issue.

Thanks. Have you got the latest I finally got around to adding some

16/8/4 Bit AD and 16/8/4 Bit DA converters. The models are pure spice3 so they will also run in LTSpice. I use LTSpice myself as a check on convergence so I try to make sure I have a set of analog versions of digital models. If you do try to run the SS generated net list in LTSpice, you have to press the pink "I" button to generate a default include file. For reasons uknown LTSpice will simply halt if it dosnt find an include file, when it should really just issue a warning. LTSpice also does this with .options it dosnt understand. I have one option that simply tells the engine to output floats instead of doubles to reduce fie size. You only need doubles for the calculations not the fnal output, usually.

My philosophy is that the engine should do its best to run, and only fail if it actually has to. So if Mikes reading this, how come not warnings instead of a fatal error?

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

This is an 'expert friendly' argument, Kevin. In general, if an include file can't be found, with most users it's FAR more likely that that file is needed for the simulation and in all likelihood continuing will lead either to erroneous results or no results at all. Far too many beginners are likely to believe erroneous output if you don't bludgeon them over the head with the fact that something about the simulation seems amiss.

But you could readily convince me that there should be a checkbox somewhere for 'treat [various] failures as warnings'; this is not uncommon with, e.g., C compilers.

I think LTSpice is fine, although I have misgivings about Mikey's twiddling of gmin, and other tricks that enhance speed but don't yield waveform-match to what I see in PSpice Probe.

I think Mark ("qrk") recently ran a chunk of their sonar chip on LTSpice and saw some bizarre results.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Not quite. I use the escape clause. "...if it actually has to..." This means that if a novice is using it, it needs to know that's and take appropriate action:-)

Yes.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Hi Jim,

What do you think of LTSpice? I know why you need the Cadence package. But LTSpice comes with a schematic entry that offers a hierarchy structure which you mentioned before as very important (and I agree with that).

Regards, Joerg

Hi Jim,

Thanks, Jim. I just downloaded LTSpice, having only had exposure to PSpice before. It does seem to allow the usual step setting so maybe these kinds of trade-offs can be avoided. What I was surprised about is the fairly large number of netlists it supports if you want to use the schematic part as the point of entry on projects.

Regards, Joerg

Kevin Aylward is missing:

Very good... I haven't tried the AD/DA converters, but they look good. Even more so since they're SPICE3 compatible.

--
Chaos Master®, posting from somewhere near Porto Alegre, Brazil.
"It\'s not what it seems, not what you think. No, I must be dreaming."

http://marreka.blogspot.com --> news, hotter than high-power transistors!

The example circuit is 16Bit-AD-DA.sss.

As an exercise, see if you can decipher the method of the AD. Hint: instantaneous successive approximation. I might post a detailed circuit of the method, if I can around to it.

The reason I decide to make them was investigating modulating the power supply of RF transmitters. One wants to make the supply track the envelope of the modulating signal to get the efficiency up. So one goes A/Ds to D/A directly, which seems quite daft initially! The DA switches little floating PS (say Transformer with diode cap) in a series/bypassed fashion. The final output is the filtered quantised input used as a PS to the TX, with low loss. The idea being that one is only limited by the raw switching speed of the dac'ed PS. A PWM is going to have trouble at say, 50Mhz modulation frequency.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

In article , Jim Thompson wrote: [...]

In discrete land, getting matched sets does this too but it costs like the dickens. I've had R-packs made to get the tight ratio match needed it turned out to be the less expensive option.

Yes, and of them it depends on the ratios that are an easier match.

The trouble starts when the parameter you are trying to control is frequency. It is hard to get frequency to depend on a parts ratio. This is a big part of why almost everything is fed into a DSP these days. The DSP cost less than the discretes that would be needed.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

And PSpice costs an order of magnitude less than Spectre...

(or, is it TWO orders of magnitude for all the bells and whistles...)

8-)

--
Charlie
--
Edmondson Engineering
Unique Solutions to Unusual Problems

I don't use OrCAD Capture, I use the old original (MicroSim) PSpice Schematics, which is about the best user interface I've ever seen.

My experience with workstation or mainframe-based tools is they are butt slow compared to PSpice running on an AMD chip.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Why is it then whenever anyone talks about this they talk about PSpice as if its the be all/end all of simulators. It's just not. You guys (and gals) should try some real EDA tools, like icfb (Virtuoso Schematic Editor/Analog Environment/Spectre). While I'm not a huge fan of Cadence, they have top notch analog tools, although I prefer Nanosim for big simulations. The schematic editor is more power, flexible and easier to use than Orcad, and the simulator is light years better than PSPICE.

dan

The problem with that statement is, its not an apples to apples comparison. There is no doubt that hardware wise Intel/AMD represent a much bigger bang for the buck in terms of computation power than virtually any other platform. A modern AMD Opteron may not be quite as fast as Sun's high-end stuff, its close, and it beats the crap out of their low end stuff which is still twice the problem.

However, virtually all Eunuchs based CAD packages (at least EE CAD packages) are now available for Linux (x86 architecture). Of those probably about 1/3rd are available in IA64 (Opteron) versions as well and I expect the number to be closer to 80% by the end of 2005.

So basically, there's no reason why you can't run any of the programs I talk about on an AMD chip. In fact, I just got a brand new 16 GB dual Opteron 250 to play with just for Nanosim, and trust me, its fast.

dan

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Nitpick: IA64 == Itanic AMD64 == Opteron/Athlon64

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  Keith

Could you please post the spec of your machine and what brand. Also of interest the speed comparison? (old vs new on same netlist) If you have access to spectre/hspice/eldo could you please perform a test and post you results Thanx