Dealing with ground nodes in simulators

I am a big fan of Henry Ott, who points out we should not even use the term ground plane. He asks where is ground in a satellite? He prefers the term “reference plane”. So when I had lunch with Sherry Hess, the vp of marketing over at AWR, the people that give us Microwave Office, I was happy to hear that one of their top researchers, Dr. John Dunn, has a great slideshow on grounding concepts as applicable to simulators like AWR makes. I told her we would love to have that available and now Dr. Dunn has written a nice white paper on the grounding in simulators (pdf).

We all have had to tack on an imaginary 1 G-ohm resistor in SPICE in order to have it converge, since SPICE can’t have floating nets. So this is always an interesting subject to me. Oh, and a real kudo to Dr Dunn. Often when technical people are asked to adapt a PowerPoint to an article all we get is some sloppy extended captions tacked onto the same slides. Instead, Dr Dunn has written a real paper, one that flows and communicates complex technical subjects. I agree with Edward Tufte, PowerPoint is for selling things and killing the space shuttle astronauts, not conveying complex technical information.

My next blog will announce Henry Ott’s next seminar so click over to that and check it out.