Online tool marries power LEDs with drivers

The LED Webench helps engineers select from more than 200 high-brightness LEDs in minutes.

National Semiconductor has expanded its online design environment with the LED Webench, a tool that helps engineers select from 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, colour, footprint, viewing angle, current and power rating.

A novel "Build It" feature ships a custom prototype kit to the engineer within 24 hours.

"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 Webench LED 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 optimised power supply circuit.

The engineer can easily "dial-in" their size and efficiency requirements, and then simulate the circuit behaviour under dynamic conditions, including startup, steady state, pulsewidth modulation dimming and line transient.

After fine-tuning the system in just minutes, the "Build It" 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 optimise a design in minutes versus investing weeks in tedious bench work", says 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".

"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.

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