How To: Simulate Designs

Once your design has been created you can run simulations on it to see if it's working as expected. This is extremely useful for both design/concept exploration as well as for working out design bugs prior to prototyping a design with actual hardware.

Simulation preparation guidelines

Following are some guidelines to follow when preparing a design for simulation:

• Add at least one ground (reference) component to the design.

• Make sure that all component parameters have values.

  If provided, default values can be used.

• Try to make component parameter values reasonable so that they make sense in the context of the design.

• If you are running frequency domain analysis, be sure to turn the AC source on.

Steps for simulating a design

The following are applied to the gear icon in the PartQuest Explore schematic toolbar:

• Select the Simulation Type.

  At this time, you can choose between Time-Domain and Frequency-Domain.

• Specify a simulation End Time (for time-domain) or simulation Start/End Frequency (for frequency-domain).

  You can add SI suffixes (e.g. m, u, k, etc.), but do not add units - they are shown on to the right of the time/frequency input field.

• Click on the Run simulation button (the button with the right-facing arrow).

  The simulation progress will be shown below the Run simulation button.