System designer adds thermal simulation to cut time to market

The new 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.

Designers can specify board properties including ambient temperature, copper thickness and wind speed. To help make design as straightforward as possible, Flex Power Designer 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.

Olle Hellgren, Director Product Management and Business Development at Flex Power Modules, said: “Since it was originally launched six years ago, Flex Power Designer has helped our customers to take full advantage of digital power technology. With this new version, Flex Power Designer is now the only design tool of its kind to include a thermal model feature – further helping designers create efficient, robust power system designs.”

Flex Power Designer is a design tool that gives designers and system architects an overview of the system configuration and efficiency of their entire power system, and goes beyond just converter configuration. The software enables relationship to be defined across rails, including phase spreading, sequencing and fault spreading, helping understand system behaviour, and reducing 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 features 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.

Flex Power Designer is available to download, free of charge.