Electronic – How are circuits which use complex ICs normally simulated

designsimulation

I understand that it is common practice in electronic design to simulate a circuit in some spice program before building it. Sometimes a project requires the use of complex ICs, for instance an IC which performs charge control for a Li-Po battery or an IC which acts as PWM controller. Manufacturers generally don't make spice models of these sorts of complex components available. I would like to find out from any electronics engineers/designers what they do in this situation. How do you simulate such a circuit? Or is it more a case of working with the manufacturer designs provided in the application section of the datasheet and trusting that the designs will work. Maybe you abstract these ICs and simulate other portions of your circuit with the kind of output signal they would provide?

I would appreciate any real world practical examples from your experience in electronic design to illustrate how you approach simulation of circuits which make use of off the shelf ICs which do not have spice models available.

Best Answer

In my experience the widespread use of simulation of entire boards is mostly a myth outside of physics simulations in RF.

Simulation rules for IC design of course, because the prototyping costs are so insane, and for anything involving HDL design, but for general electronics, not so much.

Where the sim really helps is for things like filters and control loops where you really want to make sure the breakpoints and phase shifts are what you expected, but these are typically a small blob of a half dozen or so parts that you can simulate in isolation.

Attempts to simulate an entire board of reasonable complexity tend to fail either on numerical stability or just simply on run time, which explodes once you start adding reasonable parasitics.

Generally you simulate the bits you are not sure about, which is usually less then 10% of a design (The rest is 'data sheet engineering' of power supplies and IO stuff).