New-Tech Europe Magazine | Oct 2017 | Digital Edition

Reduce Your System-Level Design Verification Effort Using PSpice and MATLAB Integration

Kishore Karnane and Alok Tripathi, Cadence

Simulation tools are of great assistance to engineers and researchers and they reduce product-development cycle time, improve design quality, and simplify analysis without costly and time- consuming experiments and physical setup. Increasing design complexity, shorter design cycles, and pressure to reduce costs are taking design simulation challenges to the next level. In today’s design world, a designer cannot just rely upon the simulation and optimization of individual blocks and hope that these different blocks will work to design specifications when assembled together. The majority of system design issues are detected at the initial prototype stages and found to be at the interconnect level. A well-integrated powerful modeling and simulation environment would enable designers to identify and

correct these issues at the design stage. Any conventional electronics or electro-mechanical system can be modeled mathematically or electrically. Let’s take the example of a Hybrid Electrical Vehicle (HEV) system to understand this better. The design for such a system requires modeling and simulation capabilities for various non-electrical systems, such as engine, transmission, fuel consumption and emission control, braking, and a variety of electrical systems. The electrical systems include inverters, converters, control logic that uses semiconductor devices (such as IGBT and precision electronics components), ADC/DAC, etc. Currently, no single tool offers the ability to model and simulate both systems together. Co-simulation between different toolsets to model

these diverse sets of modules is one way forward. In this space, MATLAB offers comprehensive capabilities to model and simulate automotive and other mechanical and thermal modules mathematically, and PSpice is renowned for its electronics and power semiconductor device modeling and simulation capabilities. The PSpice 17.2-2016 release enhances the existing PSpice- MATLAB co-simulation interface to a well-integrated, bidirectional co- simulation flow. This flow enables designers to use these two tools together in different configurations. At the initial stages of the HEV design, the engine and other mechanical systems are designed and optimized as standalone blocks in MATLAB, and all electrical systems are designed in PSpice as standalone modules. A typical HEV electrical system consists of a battery, power

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