Can we trust PSPICE for clipping???

[rodriki1]

Hi guys

I have this question.
Can we trust PSPICE for watching TUBE CLIPPING ??

Thanks for your answer.

[Sir H C]

Depends on the quality and accuracy of the model used.  I know that we use spice simulations to see what CMOS and bipolar devices are doing including clipping and other non-linearities.

[amz-fx]

I have Electronic Workbench and it shows clipping but you cannot really rely on it for details of how the waveform will look.  It's good for a general peek into the circuit but to see how it truly performs you will have to breadboard the circuit.

I had an oddball transistor circuit that I developed which worked well in Spice but wouldn't do anything in real life...  other ideas have proven out in Spice and transferred to the pcb well....  you never know.

regards, Jack

[Sir H C]

Bipolar or CMOS circuit?  Often with the mos devices they do not adequately model the body diode and so you can get that kicking in and not realize it.  Here we use the BSIM 3v3 models (might be newer ones now, I haven't looked it a bit) that work pretty well.  For bipolars the standard Gummell-Poon seems to always be pretty spot on if the device was characterized well in the first place.