Nationals Webench

How much did you pay for it? Oh, nothing. So don't complain. Anything they are providing is a bonus.

It's a tool that is useful for all sorts of reasons but not for every reason. Use at your own peril. In my experience it does generate solutions that will work while not being optimal.

Cookbook design will always be with us in one form or another. Webbench is cookbook design with some frills. (Thermal modeling is a cute frill to me, to others it's bread and butter!)

Of course it appears professional... National almost certainly makes money selling chips with it. At the same time, everyone realizes that it's selecting designs from a cookbook and fleshing them out automatically.

It's kinda neat to put in some parameters and see it realized in some standard topologies. It's a cookbook, and it knows all the standard recipes. (Or, at least the recipes using National chips...)

Tim.

When looking at a datasheet I found this simulator on Nationals site. It not only creates the circuits makes a BOM and displays waveforms. The default values are 1206 resistors and 0603 caps even with an old TO5 can opamp. Worst is that you cannot do single supply filters. You need to be (very) patient with the design and simulation. I do not want to judge too fast, maybe someone can say something positive?

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ciao Ban
Bordighera, Italy

Well, maybe we are spoiled by Linear Techs switcher cad, that not only is free, but can be used in a professional way. The Spice engine always has been free, and in the mean time all manufacturers offer free model for most of their parts. They want us to design in their parts, don't they?

But what I do not like is, that this tool is apparently aimed at the newcomer or software engineer with very few fixed circuits, but on the other hand it tries to appear professional. Analog design seems to be forgotten, if tools like this have to be used. But then.. who uses or used this programm already?

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ciao Ban
Bordighera, Italy

It didn't cost that much didn't it ? :-)

Rene

Their thermal simulation for switchers is quite 'cool'. I like it. Gives an idea of the power consumption of each component -which isn't easy to calculate by hand-. The rest of the calculations and transient response simulations are not so interesting. I like to choose 1% E12 resistors (they don't). I don't like tantalum caps (they do). There isn't so much to gain or lose in the transient response, if you use the chip, you're stuck with the transient response it has.

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Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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I have tried a few times but never managed to get it to give me anything - even when a very basic 'simple swithcher' was keyed. Is there some secret?

As far as I can tell from limited use of the simple switcher simulation, the product is good- you can accurately explore all the boundary points and transient responses. A good analog designer can use WebBench to evaluate a part's performance in test circuits- not necessarily identical with intended application circuit. One major benefit that

*could* come from this type of tightly controlled simulator is that National can insert a much more accurate model without giving away proprietary design information that could be derived from a detailed published SPICE model.