Power design software includes thermal modeling, efficiency calculations

Flex Power Modules has added new features to make its Flex Power Designer software even easier to use for digital power system design, as well as broadening the products it supports. The new version 3.2 will save engineers time when developing their power systems, as well as reducing the risk of any problems with their design.
The 3.2 version 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. In particular, it includes the thermal modeling that was added in v3.0. This enables designers to simulate thermal behaviors 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 behavior 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.

The simulation features of Flex Power Designer enable power-stage analysis to optimize tuning, as well as to visualize design behavior. Engineers can investigate how a system matches up to their design requirements by looking at specific metrics such as transient response, output impedance and power dissipation.