Imagine this: You are driving along a highway which is fantastically beautiful and a memorable ride, but reach a scenic point and realize that you are at the end of the road. Maybe there is a beautiful mountain, the ocean or a river in your way. A sign at the dead-end reads “Thanks for enjoying our highway. Best wishes on your future travels.” You can see fantastic scenery across the way, but wonder how to get there. “How am I going to cross this leg of my journey?”
There could be lots of options — maybe continue through a tunnel drilled through a seemingly impenetrable mountain, or cross the ocean aboard an aircraft carrier, or drive over the Rubicon River on a majestic bridge.
This is akin to the barrier we broke today with the release of WEBENCH PCB Export.
Those of us who are familiar with TI’s WEBENCH Power Designer know the drill:
Enter power system specifications into WEBENCH
Moments later, your design is ready
While just a click or two for the designer, this is a momentous and non-trivial task, which Power Designer makes easy with its smart but complex algorithms.
But there is still work to be done. At this point, the designer needs a physical realization of his design. Quite honestly, he needs the design to jump off of the screen to his physical bench and power his system. This was the mountain/ocean/river that we have been working hard to cross. He needs WEBENCH to cross the Rubicon.
And now it does!
After years of work, we have developed a new tool that exports—literally hands it to the user—the PCB layout. This layout, generated by WEBENCH PCB Export, uses intelligent algorithms to incorporate all the specifics of your design, prepares the PCB layout and then exports it into the format of your favorite CAD tool, includingAltium Designer, Cadence Allegro, CadSoft EAGLE, Mentor Graphics PADS and DesignSpark PCB. The design you started in WEBENCH can now be driven all the way into your CAD software.
So start a design now in WEBENCH Power Designer and try the new WEBENCH PCB Export feature to get yourself across the Rubicon. Come back here to share your experience using it - I'd love to hear how it works for you.
For those of you visual folks, please watch the video on PCB Export by Jeff Perry, director of our WEBENCH Design Center.