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TINA Model vs Spice Model

Joshua Barley
Prodigy 90 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: TINA-TI

Hello,

This is a newbie question.

I have just begun to use TINA-TI for circuit simulation. I was wondering if someone could explain to me the difference between a Tina model and a Spice model of the same component. Is there an advantage to using one model over the other in terms of speed or accuracy? When would one use a particular model and why?

Thanks,

Josh

  • 0
    TI__Intellectual 2290 points

    Hi Joshua,

            TINA and Spice models are very similar if not equal in most scenarios. One of the reasons models can differ slightly from one simulator to the other is because TINA might have some components that SPICE won't have or vice -versa. That doesn't mean that they are functionally different it just means that when you dig down to the netlist; or basically the text representation of the model that it's consumed by the simulator; there might be slightly different nomenclature for the same components. Now with that being said, from my experience it's pretty hard to find a model whose syntax has to be altered to make it compatible with both simulators. SPICE might be a bit more comprehensive when it comes to syntax but TINA covers most if not all of the supported syntax.

    When it comes to the simulator per-se they might perform time-stepping differently or have a different default integration engine so at that level you might have to tweak a bit to produce equal results. Again this is very uncommon and most of the times things work out of the box. In terms of speed the best one can do is to benchmark both models. It's hard to tell which model will work better in different scenarios, however I've had a good experience with TINA when it comes to speed because SPICE default simulation parameters are a bit tighter or more conservative and thus it might take longer to simulate the same circuit.

    From a person writing the model point of view, there is a couple of minor differences for example SPICE likes to have all floating nodes grounded while TINA might not have an issue with using the minimum conductance to ground to resolve this issue.

    Here in WEBENCH our go to simulator when developing models is SPICE since most of our customers have either SPICE or a SPICE compatible simulator so we cover a wider range by defaulting to SPICE. TINA is great and I personally have used TINA to develop models.

    I apologize for the length of my post but I hope it helps shed some light in this issue. Hopefully you won't resort to TLDR.

    Thanks,
    Marcos