Power Stage Designer Tool – help in designing power inverters

There is a saying, probably known to every electronics: “a powered device works better.” Each device must have a power supply. And as we think about power supply, we think about power inverters almost right away. There is probably no electronics that did not have contact with them. And everyone who has contact with them knows how often it is difficult to select the parameters of the elements to the  power inverter.

Power Stage Designer Tool 4.0

For simplicity, Texas Instruments has prepared a tool that simplifies the design process of power inverters. This tool is called the Power Stage Designer Tool. At the time of writing this post, this tool was published in version 4.0.

Main program view

After starting the program, we will see a menu with a list of available inverter types. By clicking on the picture of the appropriate topology a window will be displayed with the required data needed for correct calculations.

The list of available topologies is long:

The list of available topologies

Example topology:

Buck topology

Buck technology

For example, let’s choose a buck topology.

In the red frame (“Design Values”) are marked the parameters that must be specified for the correct calculation of the inductance.

The suggested inductance value is marked in the green box(“Recommended Value”). This is a purely theoretical value, which does not take into account the available inductance values from the series value.

In the blue box (“Choose Value”) we give the value of the inductance that we want to use.

Then in the orange frame (“Calculated Values at Input Voltage”) we will see the parameters of the inverter with the inductance chosen by us from the blue frame.

Only calculation of inverter elements and parameters?

Well, not only. Using Power Stage Designer Tool, we can also calculate:

Loop Calculator
FET Losses
Capacitor Calculator
Snubber Calculator
Output Voltage Scaling
Unit Converter

Summary

For someone who comes across the design of converters, this program is almost mandatory. For electronics enthusiasts – useful.