Flex extends digital power system design tool
Version 3.2 of the Flex Power Designer digital power system design tool adds a time-saving numeric conversion calculator, which makes it easier for designers to calculate linear/Vout and linear/direct formatted values seen from monitoring data. The software also includes a new display address resistor suggestion feature, which calculates suggested values for the resistors SA0/SA1.
To make the benefits of Flex Power Designer available to more engineers, the software now supports test boards for Flex’s BMR480 and BMR490 DC-DC converters. It has also added the ability to monitor common parameters for power products from other vendors, increasing the flexibility available to designers. These parameters, at a minimum, will be input voltage, output voltage and temperature.
The new version incorporates all the features of earlier releases of Flex Power Designer, including the thermal modelling that was added in v3.0. This enables designers to simulate thermal behaviours without building hardware, for example to calculate hotspot temperature and overall system efficiency.
With Flex Power Designer, designers and system architects can track or simulate the efficiency of their entire power system. They can define relationships across power rails, including phase spreading, sequencing and fault spreading – which means it’s easier to understand behaviour at a system level, and time-to-market can therefore be reduced.
The software enables configuration and simulation of the control loop, and straightforward configuration and monitoring of digital power modules. An SMBus tool and sample code are bundled with Flex Power Designer, for full SMBus control and production programming.
Flex Power Designer is available to download free of charge from https://flexdigitalpowerdesigner.com
Flex Power Modules – www.flex.com
