Ways to ensure reliability and accuracy of your design!

Performing different kind of analysis on a design is a common industry practice to ensure reliability and accuracy of the circuit.

Performing simulations helps understanding the impact of tolerance, temperature, and other factors on your circuit performance. Some of the analysis performed by designers include stress and worst-case analysis, tolerance analysis, MTBF, FMEA etc. All these analyses can be performed either manually with circuit calculations or using any tool that supports them. For time saving, ease of use and more accurate calculations simulation tools are preferred over manual calculations.

There are diverse tools and techniques available in the industry for this. Each organization have their own process and templates to perform these analyses. What are your recommendations for the tools/practices that you follow to perform these analyses?

• Perform manual circuit calculations
• Use tools like PSpice for simulations and recording node voltages/currents.
• Use different analysis available in PSpice like Monte Carlo (Tolerance Analysis), Worst-Case/Sensitivity Analysis, Smoke (Stress Analysis) etc.
• Use any other third-party tools

I would like to hear your comments/recommendations based on your experience and practices.