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Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
"Love is good, but not as good as a Spice simulation." - Sid Vicious
Microsim/Orcad/Cadence/whatever "PSpice" doesn't work quite the same as Electronics Workbench, or the other newbie packages where you get virtual test equipment to hook up to your circuit.
All of the node voltages and currents get calculated anyway, so in the results viewer (used to be called Microsim Probe, not sure what it is now) you just press the Insert key, and it pops up a dialog of things that you can plot. The power of this is that you can also type in math expressions, so to see the gate voltage of the top transistor in a halfbridge, you might enter V(M1:G)-V(M1:S) or whatever.
I believe you can also drop voltage and current probes in the schematic editor and it'll add the appropriate trace to the plot in Probe, but I never used that feature.
I seem to remember you press F11 to simulate, too. I can't really remember as I changed to LTSpice a while back.
Registered Member #76
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 10:04AM
Location: Hemer, Germany
Posts: 458
a other nice software i use for my simulations is called swcad or switcher cad. its freeware and spice based. its much more simple than pspice and cause i never really understood pspice, i use this software instead.
Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Steve Conner wrote ...
"Love is good, but not as good as a Spice simulation." - Sid Vicious
Microsim/Orcad/Cadence/whatever "PSpice" doesn't work quite the same as Electronics Workbench, or the other newbie packages where you get virtual test equipment to hook up to your circuit.
All of the node voltages and currents get calculated anyway, so in the results viewer (used to be called Microsim Probe, not sure what it is now) you just press the Insert key, and it pops up a dialog of things that you can plot. The power of this is that you can also type in math expressions, so to see the gate voltage of the top transistor in a halfbridge, you might enter V(M1:G)-V(M1:S) or whatever.
I believe you can also drop voltage and current probes in the schematic editor and it'll add the appropriate trace to the plot in Probe, but I never used that feature.
I seem to remember you press F11 to simulate, too. I can't really remember as I changed to LTSpice a while back.
Steve, are you familiar with the term ''WTF factor''?... Because that is exactly what I met after trying to get on with Pspice. And I'm a specially bad case.
As of now, I simply couldn't ever been bothered because I would need like several months of full devotion to get through it.
There are too many things that need to be learned by heart- it is sort of like a programming language.
Having things like scope among parts toolbar as in EWB is in other case really annoyng thing, I wouldn't expect that for any serious software.
We use EWB at school, I sort of learned to use it but I don't like it.
Lots of things that work perfectly well in reality simply don't work there for unknown reasons. I could never get things like royer oscillator or halfbridge-driven series RLC to work properly.
In any case, effort of making any more complex simulation to work was not worth of simply building the real thing.
If I knew to use spice well it would probably save me lots of time and teach me lots of things. I just can't get solaced enough to devote myself to it.
Registered Member #146
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 04:21AM
Location: Austin Tx
Posts: 1055
All i can say is, ive been using pspice for awhile now and its all pretty automatic for me. When i started it was like trying to budge a mule, but now my simulations almost always work, and i can do whatever i need with it. Its worth the time investment in my opinion. Ive seen some other simulators out there that didnt seem to give as detailed results as pspice is capable of (provided you know how to tell it just how detailed you want it!).
And to be on the topic of CM IGBTs... i even used pspice to simulate the reverse diode recovery problem i was seeing with the CM300s, and with the appropriate inductances in the model, the results were stunningly similar to what my scope probe measured (about 100% overshoot with ~10MHZ ringing). Of course its very easy to do something wrong in simulation and have it look 10X better or 10X worse than reality, so i like to do a little variation of parameters and see the effects of things to get a feeling for how the simulation works.
Registered Member #224
Joined: Mon Feb 20 2006, 07:53PM
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 2
First, thanks for sharing your design, it's nice to see such collaboration. The other thing I wanted to mention is that for some strange reason I cannot open the expressSCH schematic. I'm using expressSCH 6.1.2 (latest) and I get an error that says "... is not a valid expessSCH file". I can open the PCB layout no problem. Any ideas or maybe you could post a .pdf file? Thanks
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CM300/CM600 High Power Gate Driver - Complete Design with PCB
