Altair is a data-driven company that helps its partners and customers use that data to perform various engineering activities. The organization says that the business world is complex and within that complexity are opportunities to build new solutions to current and future problems. Data analytics, simulation, high-performance computing and the Internet of Things are some of the areas where Altair currently spends its efforts. Altair recently announced its acquisition of Powersim, publisher of power electronics software tools. PSIM and DSIM, Powersim’s most recognizable products, are built to help engineers run electronics simulations faster and with better accuracy.

Ulrich Jakobus, the chief engineer for electronics at Altair, answered some questions about Powersim and its acquisition. He said that the vision of Altair is the transformation of enterprise decision-making through the controls of three pillars—physical simulation, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Physical simulation involves more traditional solvers in the domains of structural analysis, crash, thermal, electromagnetics, fluid, dynamics and more. PSIM, the flagship product of Powersim, fits into the electronics and embedded systems portion of this simulation pillar. High-performance computing focuses on job scheduling and data management systems complemented by cloud solutions. The artificial intelligence pillar focuses on the Internet of Things, smart product development, preparation and analysis of data, and data visualization.

Research and development is a focus for any tech company, working to evolve along with the needs of its customers. Jakobus said that part of Altair’s strong commitment to R&D is the acquisition of technologies. Around 30 partnerships and acquisitions are in place right now globally, 10 of which are in the domain of electronic system design. In fact, Jakobus joined the organization in 2014 as the result of the acquisition of EM Software & Systems; and Altair has been building its electronic system design portfolio ever since. One of the main focus areas of current partnerships is combining electronic system design with optimization tools.

Powersim is a company more than 20 years old that has the same goal as most simulation tools—using data to make better decisions earlier in the design process. PSIM is built around optimization both at the circuit and system levels, from design to simulation. The design verification arm of the software works to make a product’s Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (DFMEA) for power converters. Monte Carlo analysis, sensitivity analysis and fault analysis can all be performed to help find issues with a power converter design in the DFMEA phase.

The software’s Embedded Code Generation takes a control schematic and creates C code. The code generation takes humans out of the loop. This automatic generation aims to pull time out of the development process, with a long list of hardware formats already in place. Meanwhile, PSIM’s C Block functionality gives users the ability to generate their own custom code without having to compile the code first. The block lets programmers specify the number of inputs and outputs while using predefined variables to help build a custom code piece. Simplified C Block runs the lighter jobs for simple functions, and the C Block lets users define their own functions and create custom libraries.

The Thermal Module of PSIM helps to design diodes, MOSFET and IGBT switching devices. Loss calculation can be run through fixed junction temperature impacts or with heat dissipation. Silicon carbide and gallium nitride wider bandgap semiconductors are analyzed using the MOSFET characteristics. PSIM is built for electronic design and gives special attention to motor drives, power supplies, microgrids, multi-level converters and energy storage.

The acquisition of PSIM is the next step in Altair’s strategy of attaining companies and tools that can better design and simulate electronics. The 2014 addition of power electromagnetics technology was the beginning of Altair’s expansion into electronic design capabilities. Jakobus also talked about the 2019 acquisition of Polliwog and its PollEx software, which brought in new PCB design and verification functions and solvers for power integrity, signal integrity and thermal aspects.

Unlike the software and tools available through the Altair Partner Alliance, PSIM will be an in-house Altair tool under the Altair brand. While the two companies had mutual customers, they had no partnerships and PSIM was not previously available through the Altair Partner Alliance. The acquisition provided an opportunity to bring the tools in-house along with the people. The tools are important, but the body of knowledge that current designers and programmers possess will make Altair stronger in terms of power electronics simulation and design.

Jakobus said that one of the key differentiators of the PSIM software is its speed and accuracy, which is accessible in a very user-friendly interface. The plan is that some Altair technology can be used to make PSIM even faster, and cover broader use cases, with an eye toward having the eventual offering as a cloud-based application. PSIM does not require heavy computing power on multiple machines and looks to be a good candidate for a browser-based delivery. Offering a software application as a cloud-based tool relieves a company’s IT department—especially with a smaller company—of the burden of deploying software, updating software and maintaining licenses and different file versions.

The best opportunities for the companies’ offerings to come together are in the motor design, system integration and SPICE areas. Flux and FluxMotor are the current Altair products that focus on motor, sensor and actuator design. Many of the functions from PSIM and Flux can be used to improve each other as well as create a new streamlined tool. Altair Activate is the integration platform that can simulate systems of systems, and this complements PSIM’s holistic approach to electronic design. Activate has code generation capabilities, and PSIM has code generation. The goal is to take the best parts of each and create a new tool. PSIM also integrates SPICE into itself as a dual solver that reduces computation time, and Activate uses Altair’s proprietary version of SPICE in its circuit simulation areas. PSIM has different levels of component models, with the idealized models delivering the fastest solution times at the cost of some accuracy. As engineers get further along in the development cycle and require higher fidelity models, a shift can be made to Altair SPICE.

Jakobus said that the integration of Powersim into Altair will come in phases, with one focus being on current PSIM customers. Enabling these customers to continue using PSIM and keep their work moving without disruption is a primary concern. The near-term goal is to bring PSIM into the Altair Units licensing system, giving any existing Altair customer access to the electronic design tools. He added that PSIM is a mature product with a long history that will continue to exist, and that Altair will invest in its continued development. Future integration of the PSIM tools with Altair Flux, Altair FluxMotor, Altair Activate, and other co-simulation opportunities—like thermal—will happen on various time lines.
Previously Altair was operating with one major release and two feature updates annually. PSIM, however, followed a more aggressive and less predictable release schedule. It’s assumed that these updates will become more closely aligned going forward. For both companies, updates were a mix of customer requests, hotfixes and features related to a long-term plan based on anticipating customer needs and technological advances. Bringing Powersim under the Altair umbrella was not a choice made to break into any industry sector, according to Jakobus, and that electrification is a huge shift in the world’s technology and PSIM will help with the design of power electronics in all mobility sectors.

When an organization as big as Altair decides to acquire a software company, it’s always interesting to see what happens with the preexisting tools. We can look at Pollex and its place in the Altair family to see that PSIM will most likely exist on its own as a power electronics design and simulation tool for a long time. The strategy of buying companies that are not necessarily competitors but working in similar fields is a solid one, especially when framed as an acquisition of the existing tools and the knowledge base of the company’s employees.

The big things to watch in the next few years will be the developments of PSIM and how it moves forward. I think it will continue to rapidly add features and make improvements to its core areas. Even more interesting is DSIM, the next generation tool—as they put it—that Powersim is developing. DSIM has a cheetah for its logo and seems built for one thing—bringing fast results. If the overall goal of simulation is to give engineers better information earlier in the design process, I’m excited to see what the near future of DSIM will look like.