PSpice

PSpice is a SPICE analog circuit and digital logic simulation software that runs on personal computers, hence the first letter "P" in its name. It was developed by MicroSim and used in electronic design automation. MicroSim was bought by OrCAD which was subsequently purchased by Cadence Design Systems. The name is an acronym for Personal Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis. Today it is evolved into a analog mixed signal simulator.

History

PSpice was the first version of UC Berlekey SPICE available on a PC, having been released in January 1984 to run on the original IBM PC. This initial version ran from two 360KB floppy disks and later included a very capable waveform viewer and analyser program called Probe. Subsequent versions improved in performance and moved to DEC/VAX minicomputers, Sun workstations, the Apple Macintosh, and the Microsoft Windows platform.

Current implementation

PSpice, now developed towards more complex industry requirements, is integrated in the complete systems design flow from OrCAD and Cadence Allegro. It also supports many additional features, which were not available in the original Berkeley code like Advanced Analysis with automatic optimization of a circuit, encryption, a Model Editor, support of parameterized models, has several internal solvers, auto-convergence and checkpoint restart, magnetic part editor and Tabrizi core model for non-linear cores.

PSpice products included in OrCAD 16.0

* PSpice
* PSpice A/D — a mixed-signal simulator, that provides a complete simulation environment for designs that contain both analog and digital electronic parts.
* PSpice Smoke — a tool that performs a stress audit to verify that electrical components are operating within the manufacturers' safe operating limits or de-rated limits. The Smoke tool flags violations such as power dissipation, secondary breakdown limits, current/voltage and junction temperature limits.
* PSpice Advanced Optimizer — a tool that automatically analyzes analog circuits and systems and fine-tunes them faster than trial-and-error bench testing. It helps find the best component values to meet performance goals and constraints. The Optimizer includes four engine types: Least Squares Quadratic (LSQ), Modified LSQ, Random and Discrete.
* PSpice SLPS interface allows substitution of actual electronic blocks to Simulink environment, thus allowing e.g. co-simulation of electrical and mechanical systems.
* PSpice Advanced Analysis incorporates five capabilities — sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo (yield) analysis, Parametric Plotter and the already mentioned Optimization and Smoke analyses.

See also

* SPICE

External links

* [http://www.cadence.com/downloads/orcad/requestform.aspx?dl=orcadDemo Request page] of the free, limited-feature demo version of OrCAD (that includes PSpice) at Cadence website.
* [http://www.cadence.com/products/orcad/downloads/pspice_schematic/index.aspx PSpice Schematic] , a product that has been discontinued with the OrCAD 10.0 release, but is still available for download.
* [http://www.compeng.dit.ie/staff/ptobin/pspicebooks.htm Books on PSpice]

* [http://www.flowcad.de/PSpice.htm] description in >German