![]() Now that speed is less of a factor, you can put real switches in, and Spice can handle them in a reasonable amount of time. LT Spice is leading the charge because it is free, and the models are relatively rugged. ![]() Spice now runs at a reasonable pace on the latest PCs, so it is back in the game. If you can afford it, you should have this program. The achievements of Simplis are remarkable, but it is a massive effort to keep this program going for a relatively small marketplace (power supply companies are notoriously cheap, so the potential market does not get realized), and that keeps the price quite high. Only the Duke program survived, with Ron Wong leading the effort at a private company. With windows, the programming overhead to maintain programs like these moved beyond the scope of what university research groups in power electronics could handle. Virginia Tech had COSMIR, which I helped write with a grad student, Duke University had the program which later became Simplis, and the University of Lowell had their program, the name of which I don't recall (anyone remember?).Īll of these programs started before Windows came along, and they were fast and efficient. ![]() Three universities started writing specialized software for converter simulation to address this shortcomings of Spice. Ideal-switch simulations were used with other software to get rid of many of the nonlinearities of devices that slowed simulation down, but Spice really hated ideal switches as it would try to converge on the infinite slope edges. It was never intended to handle the large swings of power circuits, and coupled with the numerical problems above, was just not a feasible approach. In the 80s, Spice ran so slowly that is was not an option unless you wanted to wait hours or days for results, and frequently it failed to converge anyway. As Hamish mentioned above, one of the problems encountered is inductor cutsets, and capacitor loops that lead to numerical instability in the simulation matrices. ![]() Power electronics has always provided a special challenge for simulation. ![]()
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