Power supply simulation for Altium Designer users

Altium Designer, Altium’s unified electronic product development system, lets electronics designers take a new approach to system design by bringing together board-level hardware design, embedded software development and FPGA-based system design within a single unified environment. This unified design approach allows board-level designers to exploit the potential of FPGAs as a system platform without the need for specialist FPGA skills. This reduces time to market and helps remove the barriers often found within design teams and the integration of their disparate toolsets.



Power management and power supply design is a crucial part of nearly all electronic product design projects, particularly those involving devices such as FPGAs, which can require several independent power rails.



SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is a powerful simulation engine, which has been optimized to provide unmatched simulation speed of switching circuits for power supplies. In addition to using Altium’s in-built SPICE 3F5 simulator, engineers using Altium Designer can now make direct use of SIMetrix/SIMPLIS. On top of the speed advantages, SIMetrix/SIMPLIS combines accuracy and convergence which further supports challenging power system design.



SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is invoked directly from the Altium Designer schematic editor. The standard Altium Designer SPICE component models are translated on-the-fly for use by SIMetrix/SIMPLIS. Components can be linked directly to SIMetrix/SIMPLIS models if desired. Results are displayed in Altium Designer’s powerful Wave display/editor for analysis and post processing, providing a completely clear simulation flow when using the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS engines.



Nick Martin, CEO of Altium, commented, “The innate characteristics of switch-mode power supplies make simulation using traditional SPICE simulators notoriously slow. The addition of support for SIMetrix/SIMPLIS gives our customers access to these powerful engines without leaving the unified Altium Designer environment, which will save them significant development time.”



“As the pressures to reduce design cycle time continue to mount,” said Tom Wilson, Vice President of Business Development, of Transim Technology, “the need to use simulation for final design verification is becoming critical.” John Warner of Catena Software added, “The integration between Altium Designer and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS will make this design task easier and streamline overall design flows. This is a win for both Altium’s customers and our customers.”



Doug Richardson, CIO of Vicor, one of the world’s leading suppliers of power products and components and user of both Altium Designer and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS, commented, “We can now complete our design flows entirely within the unified design environment provided by Altium Designer, while making full use of the power and versatility of the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS engines. A great result and time saving for us.”



Altium Designer customers only need to purchase and install the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS version 5.3j product in order to make use of this new feature.