HLU Industrial Seminar: Bridging the Gap Between PLECS and SPICE

Date: 16 April, Thursday, 2026, 17:30 – 19:15; 
Speaker: Riccardo Breda, Power Electronics Engineer, Plexim;
Location: TUM Main Campus Lecture Hall 0606.

Participants: All students are welcome.

Topics

Power electronics design has historically been constrained by a fundamental trade-off: system-level simulation tools provide the speed and robustness required for controller design and overall system analysis, yet lack the device-level fidelity needed to validate component choices prior to procurement.

For more than two decades, Plexim has advocated a top-down design methodology, allowing engineers to model complete power electronic systems using ideal switches and behavioral components. By deliberately avoiding the computational overhead associated with detailed switching transients, PLECS enables fast and effective evaluation of system-level metrics such as efficiency, control dynamics, and thermal performance.

In contrast, conventional SPICE-based simulators follow a bottom-up paradigm. They are highly effective for device-level validation, leveraging detailed semiconductor models to accurately capture switching losses, voltage overshoots, and parasitic effects. However, this level of detail significantly increases computational cost, making full system-level simulations impractical.

As a result, engineers are often forced into fragmented workflows, relying on multiple software environments with differing modeling philosophies and incompatible component libraries. Transitioning from a system-level PLECS model to a SPICE-based implementation typically requires rebuilding the model from scratch—an inefficient and error-prone process. With PLECS Spice  both system-level and device-level analysis can be performed within a single model, eliminating the need to maintain duplicates across separate software platforms.

Agenda:

• Introduction to PLECS Spice
• First Steps with PLECS Spice
• Open possibilities with PLECS Spice

Presenter:

Riccardo Breda: received the M.S. Double Degree in electronic engineering from the University of Udine, Udine, Italy, and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2021 and the PhD degree from the University of Udine, Udine, Italy, in 2025. From 2019 to 2025 he was carrying out research in power converters and drives control at the Power Electronic Converters, Electrical Machine and Drives (PEMD) Laboratory at the University of Udine, Italy. From 2023 to 2024 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC) of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States. He is one of the first recipients of the IEEE PELS Graduate Studies Fellowship and John G. Kassakian Fellowship. In 2025 he joined Plexim GmbH as a power electronics engineer.