Engineers match LEDs with energy-efficient LED drivers with online design environment.
National Semiconductor Corp. has introduced its light-emitting diode (LED) WEBENCH® online design environment (www.national.com/webench) that helps engineers select from and design with more than 200 high-brightness LEDs in minutes, according to the company. On the site, products from Avago Technologies, Cree, Lite-On, Nichia, OSRAM and Philips Lumileds are compared across multiple parameters, including:
- Light output.
- Color.
- Footprint.
- Viewing angle.
- Current.
- Power rating.
A ‘Build It!’ feature on the site is capable of shipping a custom prototype kit to the engineer within 24 hours of its design.
“LED solutions demand a system-level approach,” says Kai-Chong Cheng, senior marketing manager for the Solid-State Illumination Division at Avago Technologies. “National Semiconductor’s easy-to-use LED WEBENCH design environment pairs a variety of Avago’s high-brightness LED products with drivers from National, providing a complete LED solution to the design engineer.”
With National’s LED WEBENCH suite of tools, engineers can configure a system with up to 60 LEDs in serial or parallel strings. With a single keystroke, the LED WEBENCH tool matches an LED with one of National’s PowerWise® energy-efficient LED drivers and creates an optimized power supply circuit, according to the company. The engineer can easily “dial-in” size and efficiency requirements and then simulate the circuit behavior under dynamic conditions, including start-up, steady state, pulse-width modulation dimming and line transient. After fine-tuning the system, the ‘Build It!’ feature provides a complete bill of materials for the LED circuit and the ability to ship a custom prototype kit containing the selected LED, PC board, driver IC and passive components.
“Based on a study of users, LED WEBENCH saves 32 engineering hours in the selection, design and build of a power supply,” says Phil Gibson, vice president of technical sales and Web tools at National Semiconductor. “Since no one can dedicate four days of solid work on anything, this translates into a project that takes several weeks of calendar time. National’s LED WEBENCH tool enables the design engineer to complete this process in just minutes.”
The LED WEBENCH toolset works seamlessly with National’s other WEBENCH tools for power, signal path design, audio, amplifiers and active filters, including National’s Analog University® online learning facility. National’s WEBENCH design tools can be viewed at
http://www.national.com/webench.
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