Re: Great Movie Line from an Old Bob Hope Movie

"Paul Burridge" wrote >

Yep. A lot of the packages moved offshore quite a while ago to the Assembly houses in the Asian area. Thailand, Singapore, and others take the die from the IC manufacturers and wirebond it into the various packages. Or wedgebonds or ballbonds or ...

Do a google on Assembly IC packages and you should see a few of their sites.

Robert

I mean e.g. the following:

I want to simulate behaviour of a resistor which characteristic (U: Voltage, I current) is given by I = f(U) or U = g(I)

Can I feed these characteristics directly into spice or would I have to convert e.g. g(I) to its inverse function in order to model this resistor with spice?

Or a component is given by: I = d/dt(I) * d/dI(f(I)) or U = d/dt(U) * d/dI(g(U))

Possible or not? Thanks for your answers! Michael

And your point is... ?

Is this your webpage?

If not, get busy with something useful and start your own.

Read up on "Behavioral Modeling" in the PSpice manual. Powerful, yet easy.

...Jim Thompson

What do you want your spice to do?

Most of us are keen to ditch the

You want to pay the least for obtaining the features that *you* want. There is no hard rule on what "should" be used.

I personally think PSpice and Micro-cap are not cost effective today. That is, while PSpice (I don't know much about MCap) is quite a decent, usable product, its features simply doesn't justify its high price. What it does that others don't, is hardly worth bothering about. LTSpice, is a usable product, and is free, therefore it is very good value for money. However, I personally I find its GUI limiting, and some of its basic features lacking, despite its excellent speed and convergence.

If I was a millionaire, I would still use my SuperSpice, because it is the one that I, as a professional analogue designer, find is easiest to use, and has all of the key features that *I* require to do both board and I.C. level design.

What *you* require may be quite different.

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

Sounds like a lot of operator error to me. In that respect Micro-Cap isn't going to be any better than PSpice

I'd be interested in seeing examples where you thought PSpice erred and Micro-Cap doesn't.

Now, if you're complaining about the OrCAD Capture interface, then you have my heartfelt sympathies ;-)

I use Schematics as my PSpice front-end, but it's likely to be discontinued this release.

At that point in time I will switch to a new simulator with a Schematics look-alike. Watch for its official release... it's in beta at the moment.

...Jim Thompson

Thanks for the links. Okay. I'm only talking about RF transistors here; nothing more complicated than that. No specific package, but rather a variety of the common types that are mostly used for encapsulating RF trannies.

This would be simulator dependent. I know with Micro-Cap, you can put in an equation directly into a resistor to define the resistance, and I believe PSpice does the same although I'm not 100% sure on that.

Alex

behaviour of a resistor which characteristic (U:

Yes, PSpice can do equations directly.

...Jim Thompson

I would expect that devices specifically designed to be applied in RF applications will have these strays, as present in the recommended board layout, in their manufacturer-generated models.

The only problem is with 'misapplied' devices in conventional packaging.

If you have an application, then you will have a list of candidates with specific package types that need to be addressed.

RL

RL

Yes. You can make a model using the B source, or a gm source.

Yes. Any standard spice will allow you to model this simply by using capacitors/inductors in a little ".subckt". XSpice based ones (with is just about all of them) will also allow a second method, that is by using laplace S transforms. Look up the help in what ever spice you use e.g.

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

Hi Active8,

No idea, I am only a guy who has to use windows for biz reasons and doesn't particularly like it. All I heard is that if you start using another Win system the old stuff better be gone or may never run right. That's what an IT guy told me.

Regards, Joerg

Well, ultimately, we want it to assist us in creating cost-effective electronic circuits that perform reliably, and within the specifications given to us... We're in the industrial measurement instrument business, and as such we're simulating board-level analogue circuit blocks, which (intentionally) tend to be schematically rather simple. But we do like to see how new designs should/might function in some depth, and clearly Spice can be of great help every so often. It's generally a case of "Well, it seems to work as I thought, but what if I do this... Yes, that's better." Or sometimes "Christ, I'm glad I checked that..." I guess we're fairly typical users in that respect.

Here's what I certainly don't want my Spice to do:

- Give erroneous results that other Spices don't.

- Throw up convergence problems that other Spices don't.

- Slow down my rate of simulation with a clunky interface, or lack of flexibility.

- Make adding vendor models a chore.

- Crash.

Personally, I treat Spice like Excel, or a calculator. Fancy features are fine, and potentially useful in a future project, as long as it all works... It's also very important that it can do all the really basic stuff without giving me a headache, or making me swear too much.

Agreed. That's why I use LTspice when I have no option but to work at home :) Office tools are a different matter. To be honest, we're not overly concerned about the price, as long as it keeps the majority of us happy.

Having tested MC8 for a few more hours today, I have to say it's growing on me rather quickly. The interface seems significantly more flexible, efficient and user-friendly than PSpice. And it hasn't done anything noticeably strange so far...

I've never tried SS myself, but in the interests of evaluating various possibilities, I may well do so in the near future.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

-P

I think that makes sense. When I installed w2k the 1st time, it found a SystemCommander or Boot Magic MBR with the old XP entry for partition 3 (part 1 was also XP, but I was formatting that with w2k install and thus it would be wiped out) and added it. Then I destroyed all but OS and data partitions, created an app and data partition, and reloaded w2k without first deleting the XP entry in boot.ini - the 2nd install of 2k found that.

Anyone here using AutoTRAX EDA software from

I bought it last weekend and find it to be extremely quirky. For the price it could be great ($95 US), but there are a million little problems that make it very frustrating to use.

I have been able to get exactly ZERO support from their e-mail support, as well as the Yahoo group. I am wondering from any users if this is typical, and if for support you ended up just calling England and talking to them directly.

Thanks,

Jim Newark, CA

I've followed the development of AutoTRAX with some amusement (more like schadenfreude, perhaps). It appears that the developer (he's a one man band) is getting users to test his software for him and help him debug it. The result is that it is full of bugs which probably get fixed, but new bugs seem to get introduced in the process. One of the problems is that it is written in Visual BASIC which isn't really the best way to do it, IMHO. The Pulsonix software I use is written using object-oriented techniques in Visual C++ by experienced programmers, which makes it quite easy to produce robust code that is easily maintained.

The handful of users who have managed to get boards made successfully using Autotrax seem to have had to edit the outputted Gerber files manually! You'll be much happier with something like EasyPC, it's about the same price and gets the job done with very few problems (I used it for years):

Leon

Hi, I want to buy Orcad. Since they are charging £4000 for a new copy there is no way that i can afford that. Does anyone have Orcad 9 (or hiher version such as 9.2 or 10) that they are not using. In ur reply please indicate how much you would want for it. Thank You.

Tamim

I find that a few well placed blows from a carpenter's framing hammer will render almost anything non-bootable.

Jim

I read in sci.electronics.design that Jim Meyer wrote (in ) about 'OT: Render External USB Harddrive As Non- Bootable', on Fri, 20 Aug 2004:

Even your left foot. (;-)