Voltage and Current Sources

Abstract

This chapter perforce is largely a catalogue of their abilities. The basic voltage and current sources can be assigned a DC value and an AC value with phase, parasitic resistance and capacitance. The current source can be defined as an active load sinking current or as dissipating constant power. But for transient analysis, we can define sine, pulse, exponential, frequency modulated, piecewise linear waveforms or a ‘.wav’ file or use an external file of piecewise values.

However, by far the most valuable feature is the provision of an arbitrary voltage source ‘Bv’ where V = F() and current source ‘Bi’ where I = F() where the myriad options for the function are illustrated and include basic mathematical operations as well as logarithms and exponentials, powers and square roots, minimum and maximum, trigonometrical and hyperbolic functions and their inverse, integration and differentiation, rounding and limiting functions, and random values.

There are also a voltage-controlled voltage source ‘E’, a voltage-controlled current source ‘G’, a current-controlled voltage source ‘H’ and a current-controlled current source ‘F’ having the very important ability to accept a Laplace expression in s.