National Semiconductor's Tool Helps Engineers

02/02/2009

National Semiconductor Corporation's light-emitting diode LED WEBENCH online design environment helps engineers select from and design with more than 200 high-brightness LEDs 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. 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.

According to the materials of the magazine EDN (Electronics Design, Strategy, News) www.edn.com.