Design tool includes thermal modelling for power design
Thermal simulation capabilities have been added to the Flex Power Designer software by Flex Power Modules. According to the company, thermal simulation will enable designers to reduce development time.
The thermal model in the latest release, Flex Power Designer 3.0, enables designers to simulate thermal behaviours in power system designs. For example, the tool allows the engineer to calculate hot spot temperature and overall system efficiency.
The tool include configuration and simulation of the control loop, and straightforward configuration and monitoring of digital power modules. It includes an SMBus tool, as well as sample code bundled for full SMBus control and production programming.
Designers can specify board properties including ambient temperature, copper thickness and wind speed. To simplify product design 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 Flex Power Designer design tool gives an overview of the system configuration and efficiency of their entire power system, beyond just converter configuration. The software enables relationship to be defined across rails, including phase spreading, sequencing and fault spreading to contribute to understand system behaviour and reduce development time.
The software platform includes built-in simulation, which enables power-stage analysis to optimise tuning, and to visualise design behaviour and how a system performs in relation to design requirements including transient response, output impedance, and power dissipation.
Flex Power Designer is available to download, free of charge.
