The migration towards green energy has seen a big increase in the number of electric vehicles and energy storage systems existing on the market, where the battery is a fundamental part. In order to provide the necessary voltage and current for the power supply of the system, the battery cells are connected in series and/or in parallel. These types of connections lead to an imbalance in the cells’ state-of-charge over time and drastically decrease the battery life. In order to prevent this imbalance, a battery management system must be used. At the moment, the simulation is used before the physical implementation in order to verify the system design, with SPICE being the preferred mixed-signal simulator. However, the literature focuses on the physical design and implementation of BMS without treating the SPICE simulation. For this reason, this article proposes for the first time the implementation and verification of a passive battery management system simulation model in the most used SPICE-based environment, OrCAD Capture. The BMS model consists of a modular approach, with the following blocks used in the implementation: cell voltage sensing, battery pack current sensing, cell balancing, power supply, microcontroller. Each block is simulated and verified separately and then integrated into the final BMS model. The simulation results of the final BMS model show that the system performs the balancing of the cells correctly according to the balancing algorithm, while the maximum error in the measurement of the cell voltages and battery pack current is 1.5%. Based on these results, the proposed methodology can be used in the design of real-world battery management systems to reach the best possible architecture before the physical implementation, leading to cost and time optimization.

Nowadays, electronic circuits’ time to market is essential, with engineers trying to reduce it as much as possible. Due to this, simulation has become the main testing concept used in the electronics domain. In order to perform the simulation of a circuit, a behavioral model must be created. Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) are semiconductor devices found in a multitude of electronic circuits, and they are also used as power switches in many applications, such as low-dropout linear voltage regulators, switching regulators, gate drivers, battery management systems, etc. A MOSFETs’ behavior is extremely complex to model, thus, creating high-performance models for these transistors is an imperative condition in order to emulate the exact real behavior of a circuit using them. An essential parameter of MOSFET power switches is the ON-state resistance (RDS_ON), because it determines the power losses during the ON state. Ideally, the power losses need to be zero. RDS_ON depends on multiple factors, such as temperature, load current, and gate-to-source voltage. Previous studies in this domain focus on the modeling of the MOSFET only in specific operating points, but do not cover the entire variation range of the parameters, which is critical for some applications. For this reason, in this paper, there was introduced for the first time a novel ON-state resistance modeling technique for MOSFET Power Switches, which solves the entire RDS_ON dependency on the transistor’s variables stated above. The novel RDS_ON modeling technique is based on modulating the transistor’s gate-to-source voltage such that the exact RDS_ON value is obtained in each possible operating point. The method was tested as a real-life example by creating a behavioral model for an N-channel MOSFET transistor and the chosen simulation environment was Oregon, USA, Computer-Aided Design (OrCAD) capture. The results show that the model is able to match the transistor’s RDS_ON characteristics with a maximum error of 0.8%. This is extremely important for applications in which the temperatures, voltages, and currents vary over a wide range. The new proposed modeling method covers a gap in the behavioral modeling domain, due to the fact that, until now, it was not possible to model the RDS_ON characteristics in all operating corners.

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for complex behavioral models on the market, as simulation has become the main verification approach used for both analog and digital functionalities. One of the most popular mixed-signal simulators nowadays is Simulation Program for Integrated Circuits Emphasis (SPICE). Over the last decade, the digital part in circuits has become predominant, but this poses big challenges when developing SPICE simulation models, as the circuits are synchronized upon internal or external clock signals, where the frequency accuracy is mandatory. The existing SPICE based simulators have built-in options to measure the signal frequency and duty cycle, but only after the simulation has completed, and in this way the frequency information can not be used during the simulation to synchronize the clock signals. There is a lot of research on frequency measurement techniques in the literature, but this topic has not been translated and covered in SPICE until now. Implementing the physical frequency measurement circuits proposed previously in the literature would increase the models’ complexity and the simulation time, without benefitting the final user. For this reason, in this article, a novel frequency measurement methodology for clock synchronization in SPICE based simulators is proposed, which aims to provide accurate measured frequency and duty cycle values for the digital clock signals with a fast simulation time. The performance evaluation of this methodology is done using OrCAD Capture, which is the most popular SPICE-based simulation environment.