Introduction

The MPLAB® Mindi™ Analog Simulator is a free tool provided by Microchip Technology that allows users to simulate analog circuits in software prior to building them in hardware.

The Mindi environment includes model files that can be used to accurately simulate designs that may contain a wide variety of Microchip and other analog products, including discrete operational amplifiers, linear regulators, LED drivers and MOSFET drivers among many others. Additionally, the MPLAB Mindi Analog Simulator integrates model files for many new analog peripherals found on select PIC® and AVR® microcontrollers. One example of this is the Operational Amplifier peripheral currently available on the PIC18-Q41 and AVR DB device families.

This document will focus primarily on getting started using the MPLAB Mindi Analog Simulator to model a few basic circuits that use the PIC18-Q41 operational amplifier peripheral. The concepts and examples covered in this technical brief can easily be expanded upon or modified for other applications.