A multi-simulator environment for power supply simulation

An integration of SPICE and a piecewise-linear systems simulator into a multisimulator environment for power supply design is presented. The seamless integration of these complementary simulators allows designers to easily select the simulator best suited to the problem at hand. The resulting design environment allows the designer to take advantage of the speed and ease of use of the piecewise-linear systems simulator for the initial circuit modeling and for long-time transient analyses. Similarly, it allows the designer to take advantage of SPICE for accurate detailed analysis over one or two cycles of operation. It is shown that two complementary power supply simulators can be driven from one schematic, that they give the same accurate results, and that by using them for the tasks for which they are best suited, simulation times can be reduced by one to two orders of magnitude