Overview

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

Francis Bacon

In this part we cover a range of circuits that provide an instructive opportunity for making use of some of the many facilities provided by SPICE. Many of the circuits will be analysed mathematically where this may reasonably be done. In many cases it is necessary to make approximations to allow the analysis to be taken to a point where useful predictions may be made and then a SPICE simulation is performed to establish the validity of the analysis and particularly the approximations. Some are examined in detail while others are presented only briefly. The topics chosen cover a wide range; but as is evident to all, there are an infinite number of others that could have been selected. Those that have are ones that I have met in my own work or which I thought could be used to illustrate some point or technique of more general interest. The approach in Part 5 is therefore in no way comprehensive and is episodic rather than a coherent development. Within reason I have included component values and plots of representative results to demonstrate what you may expect. The intention is that you should be encouraged to experiment to develop confidence in some of the techniques of analysis and the use of SPICE. As mentioned much earlier a particular flavour of SPICE, i.e. PSpice, has...