Electronics Weekly
“The thermal model in the latest release, Flex Power Designer 3.0, enables designers to simulate thermal behaviours in their power system designs. For example, this makes it possible to calculate hot spot temperature and overall system efficiency,” according to the firm.
Designers can specify board properties including ambient temperature, copper thickness and wind speed.
To simplify use, it provides graphs which can show the dependencies between multiple quantities, for example to show how temperature varies as a function of output current, output voltage and wind speed.
The overall tool is intended to aid converter configuration and provide an overview of a power system’s configuration and efficiency. It enables enables relationship to be defined across rails, including phase spreading, sequencing and fault spreading.
Simulation is included to help tune the system and visualise how a system performs in transient response, output impedance, and power dissipation.
It includes an SMBus tool, as well as sample code bundled for full SMBus control and production programming.
