MathCad Circuit Modeling: Improving Circuit Design

Challenge

Meet aggressive project schedules while reducing hardware development costs by improving the circuit design process.

Solution

The addition of detailed electronic circuit modeling in the latest release of the PTC MathCad software environment provides a powerful tool to simulate, optimize, and document the circuit design prior to building a PC board.

Summary

SPICE simulation alone will only report the performance of a circuit design, but it will not recommend component values to meet the design goals. Circuit modeling with PTC MathCad will provide recommended component value ranges while documenting the entire design process. The use of PTC MathCad circuit modeling provides numerous advantages to the project development cycle:

• Improves design quality by using project requirements to select components with consideration for all variables such as tolerance, temperature variation, voltage and current ranges, etc.

• Reduces prototype iterations by providing calculations and checks/tests that are easily reviewed for accuracy by third parties before the first board is ever built.

• Design errors are caught earlier in development which can reduce the number of required prototype iterations and their associated production costs.

• Interdisciplinary information is easily communicated for downstream tasks such as timing requirements for software configuration, or calculated PCB layout requirements for impedance and thermal issues.

• Following prototype testing, design changes are accelerated by simplified modification of existing design documentation.

• Clear, concise documentation facilitates ease of design transfer to other engineers if resource reallocation is required.

• Circuit design reuse is improved with thorough documentation requiring only a change in requirements followed by an adjustment of the component values within recommended ranges as directed by the design equations.

PTC MathCad is one of the many tools used by Tecnova to improve the quality of the end product and keep development costs and schedules on target.