A Walkthrough of the Texas Instruments WEBENCH

A brief walkthrough of TI's WEBENCH Power Designer, which allows you to create a complete power supply for your project.

WEBENCH Power Designer

TI's WEBENCH Power Designer allows you to create a complete power supply for your project including the schematic, bill of materials, circuit-board design, thermal analysis, and simulation.
To get started, head to the WEBENCH Power Designer page.

Input the minimum and maximum voltage range input for your circuit, and the desired output voltage and current and click "Start Design":




You will be asked to choose between "Module", "Integrated", and "Controller" or "Compare All Part Types."  Click to "Compare All Part Types":



You'll be presented with a screen that allows you to drill down on designs based on efficiency, BOM cost, etc. Not all WEBENCH tools are available for all parts.
There are a few symbols you can take note of here:

• The thermometer symbol indicates thermal analysis is available.
• The red sine-wave indicates simulation is available.
• The shopping cart indicates you can purchase all parts from TI.
• The blue cad with arrow icon indicates you can export the circuit board and schematic.
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Click to enlarge.

Use the Visualizer to sort parts based on size vs. efficiency, or select other features. Be sure to hit "Recalculate" if you change the input settings.

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As you make changes to the Optimizer and Advanced Filters, the solutions provided to you will begin to decrease in the solutions table.

Click to enlarge.

Or you can select an option from the Bubble-Chart in the lower left section of the screen.



Please take a moment to select a design by either clicking a bubble on the chart, or by clicking "Open Design" on the Solutions table

Thermal Analysis of Your Circuit

WEBENCH can perform a thermal analysis of your circuit board to ensure that it operates within acceptable temperature ranges at a variety of ambient temperatures.

Click to enlarge.

Anytime energy transfers from one form to another, some energy is always dissipated as heat. That heat energy transfers through your circuit board and components primarily through conduction. But a secondary form of heat energy transfer is convection, so the orientation of your circuit board will affect the way heat energy moves through your design and into other components or the environment.
An efficient design converts as little electrical energy to heat energy as possible. Linear voltage regulators such as the 7805 and 7812 dissipate a great deal of electrical energy into the environment as heat energy as they step down from one potential difference to another. Switching power supplies dissipate far less energy and can generate high potential differences from low potential differences at the cost of circuit complexity and ripple/noise.

Schematic View

Click on  "Schematic" for a schematic diagram view that you can output to your own design software.

Click to enlarge.

Circuit Simulation

Click on "Sim" to have your circuit simulated in a variety of situations: Startup, Steady State, Input Transient, Output Transient, and Bode Plot.



Here we see the startup analysis of the circuit. It takes approximately 0.0014 seconds to reach an operating potential difference of 3.3 V when a 17 V potential difference is introduced to the circuit.

Build-It Option

Click "Build-It Lite"  to generate an order form for your Bill of Materials from TI's database. Click "Order" to begin the order process.

Click to enlarge.

Click "Export" and choose a board layout to send to a fabrication shop that will create your circuit-board.



Alternatively, you can use this sheet as a starting point for price comparison for sourcing your parts.

I hope this walkthrough proves helpful!

Here's a link to the designs I used in this article. Be advised that you will need to be a registered TI user to view these designs and that they could take a minute or more to load.