Oct 24 2007
National Semiconductor Corporation today introduced its light-emitting diode (LED) WEBENCH(R) online design environment that 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.
"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 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(R) 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(R) 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."