Is pspice very useful?

YES!

You are welcome ;-)

...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 | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Yes, but it's more fun to build stuff.

Dave :)

How many 1000-transistor breadboards have you built? I've built a few that were over 1500, but simulators are so much easier ;-)

...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 | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Yes! If you compare writing differential equations for high order systems, and figuring out how to run a simulator, you'll see how useful PSPICE really is. Even with powerful mathematical tools such as laplace transforms, etc, it is decades easier to use simulation. To be a true engineer, you must understand how the software computes the problem. Too many occurances of powerful software in use with people of little knowledge running them, a misunderstanding using the software and a bridge falls over or a power supply circuit explodes :P

Pspice requires a pretty intimite knowledge of what is happening in the circuit and how to run the software. Sometimes you get some pretty insane numbers which would not happen in practice. It is really limited by the Pspice engine, the accuracy of the models used, and the application of.

I have done some pretty advanced designs in the past without use of pspice, it's all really depending on the application. I lean towards embedded design with FPGAs or microcontrollers.

Steve

It has its uses, education and IC design, asside from that it's not very useful.

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It's not so much that idiots like you making statements about things you know nothing about pisses me off. It's the fact that you get the chance to do it and then would like to argue about your stupidity.

DNA

And looking at the rest of it (without reference to your posting from google groups) you are about to get your arse raped.....

DNA

I wish i new it better. It has helped my get started for some school projects, and learn basic cct's. It's really nice when you can make something in seconds! - just make sure you try and build some of the cct's.

IIRC, PSpice is now part of Cadence? I don't know anymore since it has changed hands so many times. There are many flavors of Spice: LT Spice/Switcher Cad III from Linear Tech, TINA from Texas Instruments etc. I use to with amplifier design and I check transient responses and nodal voltages/currents against what I calculate on paper. However, I have talked to other eningeers who do not trust amplifier models in terms of THD, output impedance etc. It really all depends on how sophisticated the model is. I am guessing the same goes for discreet models like diode and transistors. If you read Bob Pease's "Troubleshooting analog circuits", he rails against Spice.

Over all, it is a good tool. Just don't design off of it. My 2 cents.

It's a very powerful tool.

Just like with Microsoft Flight simulator you can get an idea how to fly a plane.

Or watching "Portia pounds Phoenix" teaches you about whopee.

But eventually you may want to try out the real thing, solder and wires and all that stuff.

Then you learn about the things a simulator can't or won't tell you.

Correct.

I wouldn't trust the absolute values more than, say, as an order of magnitude estimate, but comparing the output from different topologies with the same amplifier should give relative measures that are meaningful. With a little care, I'd also trust SPICE for the determination of "better or worse?" among, say, different amps from the same vendor.

Yes, since in general no vendor gives away a full transistor level SPICE model (not to mention that, even if they did, you often wouldn't want to use it except as a final check since the simulation would run considerably slower).

Well, keep in mind that Bob was using a copy of SPICE that's now more than 15 years old. His biggest gripe -- lack of convergence -- is definitely nowhere near as big of a problem as it was back then. Certainly many of his other points -- that people blindly trust the answers, don't realize that there's significant variability in real parts, etc. -- are well taken, although they're not really criticism of SPICE itself so much as that of people using SPICE without understanding what's going on.

---Joel

It is certainly usefull, but it takes some time to learn how to get meaningfull results from it. After all it is still a simulator with a limited grasp of the real world. I use it mainly for simulating analog circuits to see where potential problems may arise.

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