LED WEBENCH Tool Helps Design Power Supplies in Minutes

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 and power rating. A unique ‘Build It!’ feature ships a custom prototype kit to the engineer within 24 hours.

National’s LED WEBENCH tool will be demonstrated in National’s booth #26 at the LEDs 2007 conference in San Diego from Oct. 24 to 27.

“LED solutions demand a system-level approach,” said 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. The engineer can easily “dial-in” their 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 in just minutes, the ‘BuildIt!’ feature provides a complete bill of materials for the LED circuit and the ability to quickly ship a custom prototype kit containing the selected LED, PC board, driver IC and passive components.

“National’s LED WEBENCH tool enables the design engineer to optimize a design in minutes versus investing weeks in tedious bench work,” said Paul Thieken, Cree director of product marketing for XLamp® LEDs. “In the design environment, an engineer can easily select one of Cree’s XLamp power LEDs and quickly create a design that includes the optimum driver and passive components.”

LED WEBENCH Tool Value Comparisons
Luminous Flux 1-700 lumens
Colors red, orange, amber, yellow, green, blue and white
Footprints 12 mm(2) to 450 mm(2)
Viewing Angles 60 degrees -150 degrees
Current 20 mA to 1A
Watts 12 mW to 27W

“Based on a study of users, LED WEBENCH saves 32 engineering hours in the selection, design and build of a power supply,” said 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. To try any of National’s WEBENCH design tools, go to www.national.com/webench. - National Semiconductor