Sine Wave Generator

One handy trick to improve simulation speed or quality is to put a dummy sine-wave source in the circuit somewhere (doesn’t even have to be connected to anything, not even ground). If you set it to let’s say 1MHz then the sim automatically sets the maximum simulation step size to what it thinks is appropriate for 1MHz (smaller step size is more accurate; bigger step size is less accurate). If you decrease the sim speed, it behaves as usual becoming slower and more accurate. But if you increase the sim speed it becomes faster but doesn’t lose accuracy since it locked the maximum simulation step size to something appropriate for 1MHz, and instead simulates more steps per second to let the simulation progress faster. As a consequence it does end up putting a limit to how fast you can tell it to simulate to prevent you from making it simulate hundreds of cycles per second. Anyway, by using this method you can increase the simulation speed without losing accuracy. Alternatively, by setting the dummy sine-wave source to a higher frequency you can make the maximum simulation speed be where you want and as a consequence the simulation step size will be smaller than what it would otherwise be for the given simulation speed thereby making it more accurate if you need that extra accuracy. I always do this in all my circuits so I can have a high-speed yet accurate simulation.

Thank you for a great explanation ! Actually i'd been forcing the apllication to increase the calculations accuracy by slowly varying the circuit parameters and simultaniously decreasing the simulation speed such that the accuracy/calculations time step remained at their finally achieved values allow the circuit to run properly in further re-started simulations. So the dummy sine-wave source is not so dummy at all despite of the described above technique which is in fact for the real dummies )) It's easy to observe the almost piecewise linear approximations at the curve while decreasing the simulation speed, i.e. moving from less to more accurate simulation mode.

Referring to ‘the real dummies’ is revealing.

FIRST DC SINE WAVE GENERATOE