At embedded world 2026, on the DigiKey booth, Paige Hookway speaks with Frederik Dostal, Power Specialist at Analog Devices about toolchain to develop power management solutions.
While most customers know ADI as a semiconductor company, its portfolio is increasingly including powerful design tools that help engineers get complex systems to market faster. “Analog Devices empowers the intelligent Edge with the most innovative analogue, digital, and software solutions, accelerating breakthroughs that benefit society and the planet,” Dostal explains.
One of the key challenges these tools address is the growing shortage of power expertise and the pressure it places on project timelines. “Everybody needs a power supply who does electronics, but not everybody necessarily earns their bread and butter by designing power supplies.” Many companies struggle to attract or dedicate specialised power engineers, and that lack of expertise “translates directly into a time problem” when power design becomes the critical path. ADI’s toolchain was built with precisely this in mind.
Dostal first talks through LTpower Planner, a high-level architecture tool that tackles one of the first and most complex decisions an engineer faces: how to generate and distribute multiple rails from an input source. Rather than simply drawing block diagrams, it allows users to assign efficiencies to each block and automatically calculate overall power architecture efficiency. For designs with many rails – 10, 15 or more – this is something “you cannot do in your head, just intuitively.”
With the architecture established, designers move into LTpowerCAD, which zooms in on individual power stages, such as a 5V to 3.3V converter at a given current. It recommends inductors, capacitors, and resistors for an optimised design, but Dostal is careful to draw a distinction that matters: “It’s not a circuit simulation tool. It’s actually a circuit calculation tool.” That approach delivers results quickly, making it useful both for non-experts seeking a solid starting point and for seasoned power engineers who want to fine-tune and instantly recalculate key performance parameters like loop response and transient behaviour.
From there, designs transition seamlessly into LTspice, ADI’s widely adopted circuit simulation platform. A single button exports LTpowerCAD designs directly into LTspice, where engineers can perform detailed, time-domain simulations, explore filtering, parameter tweaks, and corner cases. It gives designers the confidence that “once it’s built in hardware, [the design] actually does work” as expected.
For systems using digital power supplies with interfaces such as I²C or PMBus, ADI offers LTpowerPlay – a graphical interface for configuring, monitoring, and stress-testing digital power devices. Engineers can adjust output voltages, set thermal behaviours, and view scope-like displays of supply behaviour, all from a PC during evaluation.
The newest addition to the chain is the LT Power Analyzer, a compact lab evaluation system designed to replace a bench full of expensive instruments. Traditionally, evaluating a power supply meant gathering oscilloscopes, electronic loads, multiple meters and costly network analysers. The LT Power Analyzer consolidates all of this – plotting efficiency, generating Bode plots, and running load transients up to 100A – in a small, low-cost setup that “almost fits in your pocket.” Originally developed as an internal tool, it was released commercially so that customers can “do the actual measurement of the power supply” and compare results directly with LTpowerCAD calculations within the same software.
What makes the suite particularly powerful is how the tools are designed to work together. “The goal really is so that they work hand in hand with each other,” Dostal says, describing ADI’s aim of “closing the loop” between calculation, simulation and measurement. All the software is free to download, and engineers who don’t purchase the LT Power Analyzer hardware can still explore its capabilities.
As for who benefits most, Dostal’s says: “I would say it’s all over the board.” From aerospace and defence to instrumentation and highly integrated micromodule designs, engineers across industries are turning to ADI’s toolchain to validate that their power systems behave correctly within complex boards. In an era of shrinking timelines and scarce power expertise, these tools have become not just helpful, but essential.
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