It certainly isn’t news that I think Mechatronics is a pretty cool field of study. Whether you design and build mechatronic systems for your profession or your hobby (or maybe both), you have to admit it’s a fascinating subject. As I write this, I’m waiting anxiously for FedEx (or perhaps UPS) to deliver my latest toy – a 2006 Mini Cooper S remote control (RC) car kit. I’ve owned several RC cars over … Read More
I’ll start this post, as I sometimes do, with a disclaimer: I am not a rabid football fan. I enjoy watching an occasional game, and my wife is an enthusiastic supporter of her college alma mater’s football team (think blue turf in Idaho), but I don’t live for the game. My wife does not become a football widow, nor my children football orphans, on weekends. Football is a pleasant pastime for me, … Read More
My daily driver (at least until my daughter gets her driver’s license in a few months) is a 1982 Honda Civic 1500 DX. It’s not much to look at – paint is faded and the upholstery needs extensive repair – but the body is pretty straight and it runs quite well for being 30 years old. Could I afford to drive something else? Yes. In fact, my family’s transportation fleet includes 4 other vehicles of 1998 … Read More
I’m back at my keyboard after a brief, but enjoyable, vacation. Like last year, I trekked with my family to the Oregon Coast. Yes, we enjoy time at the beach, though this time we travelled with extended family so we spent a bit more time driving around site seeing than playing in the tide. In seven days I personally logged some 1200 miles in the driver’s seat. Luckily I don’t mind … Read More
Lately I’ve been working with customers interested in using SystemVision to simulate either a real production design, or some sort of evaluation test circuit. To a customer, however, each ran into the “don’t have a simulation model” challenge for one or more devices in their system. Despite SystemVision’s large VHDL-AMS and SPICE model libraries, we didn’t have a … Read More
It’s software release time in the SystemVision® offices, and I’m happy to announce that SystemVision 5.9 is ready for immediate download. Here are some of the release highlights:
Design entry: User interface (UI) updates including more flexible user customization; Support for multi-sheet schematics and multi-view symbols; Improved schematic symbol generation; Easier mapping between simulation … Read More
The Bugatti Veyron occupies a unique spot among dealer showroom trophy cars: the fastest production automobile in the world. With a top speed of 254 miles per hour (406 kilometers per hour), the Veyron sits atop the supercar heap, chewing up asphalt at a brisk pace just under 4.3 miles per minute (over 6.7 kilometers per minute). If a Veyron graced my humble two-car garage, I could theoretically travel … Read More
It is not uncommon for the extraordinary to quickly become the ordinary. Consider cell phones, tablet computers (or just computers in general), hybrid cars, heart transplants, drone aircraft, digital cameras, Amazon.com, Facebook…the list is long and varied. Most of these are considered “ordinary” by today’s standards, but each was little more than an idea in someone’s … Read More
Believe it or not, summer is fast approaching. My daughter is looking forward to the summer break from school. My sons, being a bit older and each completing a couple of semesters of university studies, are facing a summer busy with research or employment. When they yearn for leisure days of summers past, I usually respond with “welcome to adulthood”.
The SystemVision crew is preparing … Read More
One of the great things about working with SystemVision is its ability to model and analyze a variety of systems. One day I might be working with an automotive company discussing the electro-hydraulic performance of an automobile braking system. The next day I could easily be talking with an aerospace company discussing power distribution for the latest generation of a fighter or commercial aircraft. … Read More
In Part 5 of this series we used the mathematical descriptions of the thermal and electrical properties of an incandescent lamp to create the architecture of a VHDL-AMS-based simulation model. Now it’s time to finish the model, and this blog series, by creating a VHDL-AMS entity for the lamp model.
As I mentioned in Part 5, the VHDL-AMS entity defines how a model connects to other elements in a system, … Read More
If you’ve followed this Analog Modeling series, you know we’ve been talking about a general process for HDL-based modeling of analog behavior. If you’re new to the discussion, or simply want to review what we’ve talked about so far, check these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
In my last post we developed a set of equations describing the relationship between the thermal … Read More
It’s time to dig a little deeper into the incandescent lamp behavior I introduced in Part 3 of this blog series. My goal is to select a set of equations that best describe the elements of the lamp’s behavior that I want to quantify during simulation. Recall my comment in Part 3 that a lamp has several characteristics worth analyzing including electrical properties, thermal properties, aging … Read More
Welcome to the third installment in my Analog Modeling blog series. In Part 1 I wrote about why equations are important for simulation. In Part 2 I suggested a process flow for turning device equations into a simulation model, and introduced the basic structure of a VHDL-AMS model. Now it’s time to begin the model definition process. As I outlined in Part 2, the first step is deciding what you want … Read More
In Analog Modeling – Part 1 I reviewed the importance of equation selection in the analog modeling process. In a nutshell, the first step in getting good simulation results is choosing equations that best describe the behavior or device you want to analyze. Your analog equation set could be as simple as a single transfer function describing the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a … Read More
SAE 2013 WORLD CONGRESS EXPOSITION, DETROIT, Mich., April 17, 2013—Mentor Graphics Corporation and Agilent Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: A), the world’s premier measurement company,... View News Article
System Modeling and Integration Tutorials. These multimedia presentations provide information pertaining to model driven development methodologies. More
This series of brief (3-5 minutes) multimedia presentations explain various aspects of the BridgePoint tool and xtUML essentials in general. More