Transmission Lines in Digital and Analog Electronic Systems: Signal Integrity and Crosstalk

APPENDIX

A Brief Tutorial on Using PSPICE

This is a brief summary of SPICE (simulation program with integrated-circuit emphasis) and its personal computer version PSPICE, electric circuit analysis program. The original SPICE computer program was developed to analyze complex electric circuits, particularly integrated circuits. It was developed at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s. Since it was developed under U.S. government funding, it is not proprietary and can be freely copied, used, and distributed. This was written for use on large mainframe computers of the time. In the early 1980s the MicroSim Corporation developed a personal computer version of SPICE called PSPICE. A number of important modifications were made, particularly in the plotting of data via the .PROBE function. Since then a number of commercial firms have modified and developed their own PC versions. But essentially, the core engine is that of the original SPICE code. The MicroSim version of PSPICE, version 8, was acquired by Cadence Design Systems. Theirs is version 10.0, called OrCAD Capture, which also contains the primary simulation code PSPICE A/D. A Windows-based version is available free from www.cadence.com. The OrCAD Capture program was originally called Schematic in the MicroSim version and contains a number of enhancements. A number of books [1–5] detail the use of SPICE and PSPICE. Both the MicroSim version 8 and the OrCAD version 10 are contained in a CD at the end of this ...