Texas Instruments (TI) recently unveiled a series of advanced tools in WEBENCH® Power Designer that provide engineers extensive design control, analysis and trouble-shooting capability to create complex power-supply designs. From control-loop compensation to simulation export, WEBENCH Power Designer now puts cutting-edge tools in the hands of design engineers to create power supplies for industrial, automotive and communications equipment.
TI's cost-free WEBENCH tools have simplified and accelerated the design process for more than 325,000 engineers worldwide since 1999. While still simple to use by both novices or time-pressed engineers to quickly create, optimize and simulate a design, these three new advanced WEBENCH tools offer experienced power-supply design engineers extensive control over complex designs, along with the ease of exporting simulations to computer-aided design (CAD) platforms from Altium and Cadence Design Systems Inc.
Crafting a power-supply solution for complex design requirements is an iterative and time-consuming task. New advanced options in WEBENCH Visualizer include a set of easy-to-use controls to specify complex design requirements, such as manufacturability, component constraints and design control. Now engineers can quickly find solutions to accurately match their advanced design requirements.
One of the pitfalls of power supply design is an unstable control loop. The new WEBENCH Compensation Designer tool predicts and automatically corrects errors in the control loop resulting in a stable power-supply design. This quick "fix-it-for-me" feature is a valuable tool for novices or time-pressed engineers. It also offers advanced power experts a manual mode to tune the control loop for more bandwidth and stability in their designs.
The new WEBENCH Simulation Export tool moves the power-supply schematic into the user's preferred simulation environment. With just a couple of clicks and no intermediary software, WEBENCH Power Designer quickly exports the complete design to the TINA-TI™ simulator or Altium Designer and Cadence OrCAD and PSpice tools. WEBENCH Simulation Export joins TI's WEBENCH Schematic Export and PCB Export tools, which enable engineers to create their power supply design and easily download the layout directly to five popular CAD tools.
