Program gives asymmetrical Spice tolerance

Jan 12, 1998 Contributing Author | Electronic Design

Spice is unable to accommodate asymmetric tolerances for worstcase analysis. However, the
DISTRIBUTION statement available in Monte Carlo analysis can accommodate asymmetric
tolerances by creating histogram bins. Asymmetric tolerances can easily occur for any component
with temperature drift in unbalanced temperature environments. They also can occur in some
capacitors.
The QBasic program shown will create 20 bins of Gaussian distribution with symmetric or
asymmetric tolerances

(Listing 1). The program will print out the .DISTRIBUTION statement with bins for easy import to a
Spice net list. The example problem is a component with 10% and +2% tolerances. The asymmetry
is somewhat extreme, but it clearly illustrates the use of the program.
The program assumes 500 samples to ensure a reasonably accurate Gaussian curve. The output of the
program is given (Listing 2).

The program assumes the component is a resistor. For a capacitor, change the .MODEL statement as
follows:
.MODEL CA CAP (C=1 DEV/ASYM=10%)

and correspondingly for an inductor. The output text file is placed in the root directory C:\ with the
name qbout.txt.
A histogram for this example is shown (see the figure).