Advanced WEBENCH tools for experienced power-supply designers

Texas Instruments (TI) has unveiled a series of advanced tools in WEBENCH Power Designer that provide experienced 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 expert design engineers to create power supplies for industrial, automotive and communications equipment, says the company. 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. Watch a video to learn more about the new WEBENCH advanced tools. WEBENCH Advanced Options - 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. WEBENCH Compensation Designer - 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. WEBENCH Simulation Export - 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. “With the addition of simulation export capability to WEBENCH Power Designer, engineers no longer need to manually recreate the schematic in OrCAD Capture and gather and enter the SPICE models into the PSpice solution, or worry about errors that plagued the manual process,” said Josh Moore, product marketing director for the OrCAD product line, Cadence. “Now, the complete simulation netlist and SPICE models created with WEBENCH Power Designer can be easily and instantly downloaded via WEBENCH Simulation Export to Cadence OrCAD Capture and simulated with the PSpice tool.” The WEBENCH Designer and Architect tools allow engineers to easily create, simulate and export custom designs. The component libraries include more than 40,000 components from 120 manufacturers. The tools are offered in eight languages, says the company.