Leistungselektronische Systeme I

GeckoCIRCUITS Online Version - Technical Information

Java 1.6 has to be installed on your computer.
If Java is loaded correctly into your web-browser, you will see an orange rectangle with some text below. Please click into the rectangle to start GeckoCIRCUITS.
Java-Applets are generally restricted in their functionality for security reasons. Reading and writing to the local hard disk is not allowed. Therefore, this is deactivated in the GeckoCIRCUITS applet.
The GeckoCIRCUITS applet comes with full functionality. No limits concerning node number or element number.
The very popular JAVA-block, which allows to model part of the control via Java language, does not work in this applet-version, because it needs to write temporarily onto the hard disk. In the next version we will fix this.
If you want to experiment with the JAVA-block, please contact us for a trial version of GeckoCIRCUITS (uwe.drofenik@gecko-research.com).

GeckoHEAT (thermal modeling of power semiconductors, heat sinks and components) and GeckoMAGNETICS (inductor and transformer design with detailed loss calculation including skin- and proximity-effect) are deactivated in the applet-version.
The GeckoCIRCUITS-applet runs on your local computer which defines the calculation speed. The web-browser loads the applet (1.3MB) and starts the Java Virtual Machine (VM) on your computer. Loading the Java VM might take a couple of seconds, but has to be done only once.
The RAM available for Java applets is defined by your local settings. In typical default-settings, the Java VM will get only 60 - 80MB RAM for the simulator even if there are, e.g., 2GB RAM memory available. Therefore, you will often see a message window stating that due to memory restrictions, not every simulation step can be written to the scope. This limitation can be easily avoided if you get a GeckoCIRCUITS license from www.gecko-research.com

GeckoCIRCUITS is a circuit simulator optimized for power electronics. It is up to a factor 20 faster than some commercial simulators with comparable functionality.
We developed GeckoCIRCUITS for the PhD research program at the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory (PES), ETH Zurich, because we faced various restrictions of commercial power electronic simulators. There are currently 24 full-time PhDs and 4 senior researchers at the PES.
We use GeckoCIRCUITS in the student exercise where we offer computer exercises. Students have to solve power electronic problems with numerical simulations. Each year there are currently 120 - 150 students attending the power electronic courses of the ETH Zurich.
We are currently putting together a web-based version of some of these ETH-courses, where GeckoCIRCUITS will be available in form of Java-Applets (as you can test here). This has the potential to simplify the administration of the courses significantly.