Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
June 22, 2008
June 22, 2008
June 25, 2008
2153-5965
Electrical and Computer
10
13.1277.1 - 13.1277.10
10.18260/1-2--3616
https://peer.asee.org/3616
762
DAVID M. BEAMS is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Tyler. He received his BS and MS degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in and the Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has had over 16 years of industrial experience in addition to his 10 years with UT-Tyler. He is a licensed professional engineer in Wisconsin and Texas and holds or shares four patents.
The University of Texas at Tyler PSpice Archive
Abstract
PSpice (Cadence, San Jose, CA), has become a de facto standard for courses in electric and electronic circuits. Its popularity stems from the ready availability of the evaluation (student) version and the inclusion of the evaluation version with a number of widely-used textbooks in these courses. Many textbooks also provide access to example circuit files either in CD form or through a companion web site. However, faculty at the University of Texas at Tyler have frequently found it valuable to develop their own analyses to better illustrate particular topics or to simulate circuits found in laboratory courses. These analyses include standard types of circuits (e.g., simple operational amplifier circuits, LRC circuits) and more-advanced ones (e.g., a current-feedback operational amplifier implemented at the transistor level). These circuit analyses had been accumulating over a period of some years; a recently-initiated effort aims to rationalize their organization and to document the resources available in the archive with the intention of making the archive publicly available. This paper describes the organization of the archive, the resources available, and its incorporation into the curriculum.
Introduction
PSpice is a de facto standard circuit-analysis package for courses in electric and electronic circuits. Its popularity is attested by the fact that searching the “books” category of Amazon.com for the keyword “PSpice” produced 520 “hits.” (By comparison, a similar search for “Electronics Workbench” produced 312 “hits”). The evaluation version of PSpice is frequently bundled with textbooks. Examples of these include texts on general circuit analysis 1, general electronics 2,3, communication systems 4,5, power electronics 6, and photovoltaic systems 7. There are also textbooks intended as primers or introductions to PSpice itself 8,9,10,11. Publishers often support web sites that provide worked-out examples from the textbooks.
However, it is often easier to create one’s own additional PSpice examples rather than to sift through the mountain of available resources. This was the genesis of the PSpice Archive of the University of Texas at Tyler. The collection began as an ad hoc effort to provide educational resources to students in courses in electronics and instrumentation systems and had no particular organization. As the number of examples grew, however, the need became apparent to give the archive a rational structure and logical organization, and it has since been organized into categories (e.g., diodes and applications, MOSFETS, and amplifier circuits).
Organization of the PSpice Archive
The archive is a work in progress and is continually being modified. At the end of the fall semester of 2007, however, the PSpice Archive was organized into the categories outlined in Table 1 below.
Beams, D. (2008, June), The University Of Texas At Tyler Pspice Archive Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3616
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