4 ms·
You can survive without, just. For thermals you can create an equivalent electrical circuit and use SPICE. For power integrity you can mostly make do by cascad
by jleahy 6y ago
You can survive without, just.
For thermals you can create an equivalent electrical circuit and use SPICE. For power integrity you can mostly make do by cascading s-parameters and there is an Excel sheet floating around somewhere that'll give you s-parameters for a rectangular plane with two arbitrary connections. High-speed serial signal integrity is a bit harder, I will admit.
- elcritch 6y agoCan you elaborate on the cascading s-parameters bit?
- jleahy 6y agoSure, let’s say you have an s-parameter network that represents a PCB. You have 10 ports, 1 for the DC-DC converter, one for an ASIC and 8 for capacitors. You take s-parameter models of the capacitors from the vendor (Murata, AVX, etc) and tie off the ports of the main network to make a 2-parameter network. With a 2-parameter network you can now calculate the equivalence impedance (which is a function of frequency) and plot it or do a spice simulation with ngspice. scikit-rf is one tool that can load touchstone files and perform these kinds of transformations.
- elcritch 6y agoThanks! Seems like something that could be added to KiCad, well, if I could decipher the API.