Altium simulator??

[Agrum]

Hello everyone.

I would like to know if Altium has a simulator inside and how it works.
If I understood well, it has a Spice Simulator that works with Spice models. Is it correct? Is it included in the normal license pack?
I would like to know if it is also possible to made a simulation which take into account all parasitic effects introduced by the PCB design.

Thank you

[ajb]

The simulator is just a spice simulator, it doesn't do any kind of characterization of the PCB to determine parasitics if that's what you're after.  Well, it has some SI and PDN analysis tools, but those are only analysis and not simulation AFAIK.  So if you want to simulate with parasitics you'll need to incorporate those into the schematic the old fashioned way.

I messed around with the simulator a bit, but honestly it was too much trouble to import the required models, also some of the parts I was interested in at the time didn't have models in a format Altium could use.  I remember the process being kinda clunky and poorly documented, so unless you're going to be doing a lot of simulation it's probably faster just to use ltspice or whatever instead, and deal with having to re-enter the schematic.

[alexwhittemore]

I messed around with the simulator a bit, but honestly it was too much trouble to import the required models, also some of the parts I was interested in at the time didn't have models in a format Altium could use.

I usually don't do the kind of board work that merits simulation in the first place, but I had a circuit the other day I did want to verify for sure met expectations around threshold voltage and power dissipation in a MOSFET. Super simple. Couldn't even do it in Eagle, because there's no way to simulate just a subsection (sheet, selection, whatever) of the schematic. It's all or nothing. Ended up doing it in LTSpice as usual.

Would love to know if Altium's the same way - never did bother to simulate anything while I was using it (other than the odd LTSpice job here and there because, same reason).

[T3sl4co1l]

Altium simulates whatever is implemented -- if you've only added models for the relevant area, that's what goes to the SPICE engine.  You will get warnings that the other components don't have models.

Tim

[Agrum]

Thanks for your help!!