ECA Lab manual
Dept of ECE, Lendi Institute of Engineering and Technology Page 49
3.5 AC Sweep (Frequency Domain Simulation)
1) Set up your circuit with VAC voltage sources.
2) Go to PSpice => New or Edit Simulation Profile
3) Analysis Type: AC Sweep/Noise
4) Sweep Type: choose logarithmic and decade. Then select the frequency range of interest.
Don't start frequency sweeps at 0!
5) Set the Points/Decade to be at least 20.
Press OK and simulate. The simulation window should now include a place for you to plot
your data.
3.6 Transient Analysis (Time Domain Simulation)
1) For a sine wave, use VSIN for your voltage source instead of VAC (VOFF is the DC
offset, VAMPL is the amplitude, and FREQ is the frequency of the sine wave).
2) For a square or triangular wave, use VPULSE . The values you type in for V1 and V2 will
depend on the amplitude specified on the lab instructions. If a 5V amplitude signal is
specified, then V1 = 5V and V2 = -5V.
a. Square Wave is the VPLUSE function in the limit of TR = TF = 0 and PW = 0.5 * PER
(PER is the period of the wave). This limit case, however, causes numerical difficulties in
calculations. In any case, we can never make such a square function in practice. In reality,
square waves have very small TR and TF. Typically, we use a symmetric function, i.e., we
set TR = TF and PW = 0.5 * PER - 2 * TR. Thus, for a given frequency we can set up the
square function if we choose TR. If we choose TR too large, the function does not look like a
square wave. If we choose TR too small, the program will take a long time to simulate the
circuit and for TR smaller than a certain value, the simulation will not converge numerically.
A good choice for TR is to set it to be 1% of the PER (a period): TR = TF = 0.01 * PER, PW
= 0.48 * PER. This usually results in a nice signal without a huge amount of computational
need. Note that TR does not have to be exactly 1% of PER. You can choose nice round
numbers for TR, TF, and PW.
b. Triangular Wave is the VPLUSE function in the limit of TR = TF = 0.5* PER and PW =
0 (convince yourself that this is the case). As before, the limit case of PW = 0 causes
numerical difficulties in calculations. So we have to choose PW to be a reasonably small