For resistors, capacitors, inductors, and DC generators, you can specify tolerance values directly in the SPICE attributes of the component by specifying a value for the TOLERANCE parameter. This mode is useful for including tolerance values directly in component libraries. Tolerance specifications take the following form:

AttenzioneSyntax::
[DEV [/<group>] [/<distribution>] <value>[%]] [LOT [/<group>] [/<distribution>] <value>[%]]

You can specify either the DEV tolerance or the LOT tolerance or both. In the latter case, the tolerance values are calculated independently and added together. The combination of DEV and LOT tolerances is useful for situations where component variations are not fully correlated, but they are also not completely independent of each other. For example, in a resistive network you can have a tolerance of LOT referred to the component and a smaller DEV tolerance referred to the variations of the individual resistors.

Each tolerance type is defined by the following three parameters:

Value

It can be specified either as an absolute value or as a percentage by adding the suffix %. For example, for a 1000 ohms resistor if you specify a tolerance of 10 you will get a variation between 990 and 1010 ohms, while if you specify 10% you will get a variation between 900 and 1100 ohms.

Group

You must assign the same group number to multiple components when you want their tolerance changes to correlate, i.e. values increase or decrease jointly. If you specify group zero then the value of the component varies independently of all other components. Groups 1 to 15 are available. This parameter is optional.

Distribution

Specify the type of statistical distribution to be used. UNIFORM should be specified for the uniform distribution, GAUSS for the Gaussian distribution and WCASE for the worst case distribution. You can also indicate only the initial letter. This parameter is optional.

See also