SapWin 4.0–a new simulation program for electrical engineering education using symbolic analysis

Abstract

The paper presents the main capabilities and the possible applications in the teaching area of Electrical/Electronic Engineering of a software system developed by the authors and aimed at simulating analog linear (or linearized) circuits. The work is the enrichment, enhancement and extension of some programs developed by the same authors along the last two decades and distributed in many schools, institutions, industries, and research centers for different purposes. The feedback (in terms of suggestions, corrections, and improvement requests) has been collected to generate a completely renewed software that could definitely become a really efficient tool in the field of analog circuits, also filling the gap which still exists in the use of very famous and classical circuit simulators (as, for instance, the SPICE family). The application of the past experience involves several courses, as it will be described in the final sections of paper. ß 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 24:44-57, 2016; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae;

A Laplace transform approach to the simulation of DC‐DC converters

“…Symbolic simulation is an important complement to numerical simulation. The two combined approaches can realize very efficient software tools for the circuit design.…”

“…Using the method of Laplace transform applied to DC‐DC converters as presented in the previous section, the authors have developed a new symbolic program named SapWin for power electronics (SapWinPE). It is part of the integrated package Symbolic Analysis Program for Windows (SapWin), one of the existing symbolic programs for circuit analysis, also developed by the authors …”

A MLMVN with Arbitrary Complex-Valued Inputs and a Hybrid Testability Approach for the Extraction of Lumped Models Using FRA

“…TALIC uses symbolic techniques which help to easily determine the network function coefficients and their derivatives, necessary for the building of the matrix C(p*). The steps followed by the program can be summarized as follows: STEP 1: Chosen n x input points and n y output points, evaluate the corresponding n = n x ×n y network functions in fully symbolic form by means of SapWin [36]. The circuit is first drawn by using the SapWin schematic capture tool: in this phase, the input/output points are selected together with the parameters to be assumed as unknowns, whereas the remaining ones are fixed at an arbitrary value.…”

Design of a Web-based Teaching Environment for Engineering Education of Undergraduates

“…Simulation software has been a main teaching tool, [12][13] for example, the microcontroller Simulation-Proteus contains everything students need to develop, test and virtually prototype their embedded system designs based around the popular series of microcontrollers. Essentially, it is a computer program that converts a computer into a fully virtual microcontroller laboratory like other virtual laboratories.…”