PSpice Advanced Analysis: Smoke

Advanced Analysis plays an important role to improve the circuit performance, reliability, and yield. It is an add-on program for PSpice A/D and PSpice Simulator.

Smoke analysis helps maintaining the fire safety within electronic components and create a robust and reliable circuit.

Smoke warns about component stress due to power dissipation, increase in junction temperature, secondary breakdowns, or violations of voltage / current limits. Over time, these stressed components could cause circuit failure.

You can use smoke analysis for determining:

• Breakdown voltage across device terminals
• Maximum current limits
• Power dissipation for each component
• Secondary breakdown limits
• Junction temperatures

Understanding the Smoke results:

• Red bars show values that exceed safe operating limits.
• Yellow bars show values getting close to the safe operating limits: between 90 and 100 percent of the safe operating limits.
• Green bars show values within safe operating limits: less than 90 percent of the safe operating limits.
• Grey bars indicate the limit is not valid for the parameter.

You can also enable/disable the view for Average, RMS, and Peak values by right clicking the result and from the pop-up menu, select the values you want to view.

You can edit or create your own custom derating file to define derating values for different components.

For more detailed description and step by step process you can check following document on COS.

You can also watch a detailed video here.

Try it out and let us know your feedback.