Power Supply Engineers Can View Performance, Save Time with Enhanced WEBENCH Design Tool and New SIMPLE SWITCHER Regulators from National Semiconductor

National’s WEBENCH design environment helps make design easy. It has been expanded to include enhanced optimization tools including bill-of-material components charts, efficiency and footprint graphs and the ability to output a fully formatted report summarizing the design.

National’s new family of SIMPLE SWITCHER step-down voltage regulators offers a wide input voltage range from 4.5V to 42V, which allows for wide-voltage transients from 12V and 24V input rails. Internal compensation and small, low pin-count packages simplify the design process and reduce overall system size.

Enhanced Power WEBENCH Design Environment

National’s WEBENCH design environment enables novice as well as experienced power supply designers to easily “dial-in” their size and efficiency requirements while also realizing fast time to market. Real-time electrical simulations feature enhanced waveform processing that enables designers to see the electrical behavior of the circuit under dynamic conditions such as load transient, line transient or start up. Bode plots are also provided to evaluate and optimize loop stability. Thermal simulation enables engineers to track and solve thermal challenges in a design through the use of copper heat sinking, air flow and copper thickness.

National has added optimization graphs and charts to the WEBENCH design environment, which allow designers to view the impact of optimizing the design for efficiency or footprint. The tool graphically shows the efficiency, footprint, component power dissipation and frequency for different design scenarios.

These charts offer views of the electrical properties such as efficiency, output voltage ripple, duty cycle and power dissipation over a range of output currents and input voltages. This feature lets designers quickly view design tradeoffs and select the best design optimized for their needs.