Since the dawn of time, man has invented tools to make life easier… and today is no exception. Look around and you’ll find that just about every man made item falls into the category. Don’t believe me? Try it out… OK, “automobile” – tool, used for transporting people or things from place to place, “house” – tool, used to shelter our families and our stuff, “cellphone” – tool, for communicating with your buds to find the nearest pub or monitor where your teenager went on a date. Sure you can find an exception or two (e.g. music, art, etc.), but for the most part, we are surrounded by them.
Tools have very specific applications. That is, they are designed to solve a particular problem. For instance, nails (a very old tool) are used to secure pieces of material (wood, canvas, concrete, etc.) to each other. However, a nail requires another tool to efficiently install it - most likely you’d use a hammer to drive it into place. Exceptions include my youngest daughter who prefers a heavy book-end… but I digress. Having the correct tool for the job is always more efficient and as we use these time savers we often find ways to improve them.
This brings me to the topic of this post - WEBENCH.
WEBENCH is an “expert system” from Texas Instruments that is used to engineer power supplies and systems, LED drive circuits along with many other design functions. It supports roughly 700 Texas Instruments products and has over 40,000 schematic symbols (active and passive) in the library. WEBENCH gives designers the ability to quickly compare solutions, select the best configuration for their application, optimize and simulate the design.
However, to date designs only lived inside of WEBENCH. It could be exported to a PDF for a nice, easy to read report. However, copying the schematic to another CAD tool was difficult, time consuming and prone to error… until now.
WEBENCH now features an “Export” function that allows you to do just that… export the schematic and symbols directly to your CAD system. It currently supports Altium Designer and P-CAD, Cadence OrCAD Capture CIS, Mentor Graphics DxDesigner and RS Components DesignSpark. Now you can simply press a button and export your design to your tool. There are plans to expand the export function to support other CAD tools as well as other features.
For more information on the new WEBENCH Schematic Export tool click here or watch this cool video! Till next time…
