Design made easy with unique sensor tool

National Semiconductor won a 2008 Product of the Year Award for the WEBENCH Sensor Designer tool. We recently spoke to Phil Gibson, vice president of technical sales and Web tools, about its development.

“Sensor design is a time-consuming process, so our goal was to find a better way to help customers speed up the process of product selection, evaluation, and prototyping. Customers told us they needed shorter design cycles and they wanted a quick and easy way to link sensor performance (accuracy, linearity) to signal path performance (SINAD, INL). That way they could understand the performance of the complete sensor signal path and optimize it for their application. Customers also wanted flexibility so they could change sensor parameters, automatically modifying the signal path solution to meet their specific application need.

“Development of the WEBENCH Sensor Designer tool involved a cross-functional and cross-organizational team. The team required experts in sensors, signal path electronics, high-frequency and low-frequency noise, electrical modeling and simulation, layout engineering, software design, and Web technology. The team used a new Flex development platform to pull it all together so the tool could be delivered locally and through the internet to any user.

EP presents POY award to the design team

“The biggest challenge was understanding the structure of the sensors our customers use and then to group them into device families that could be addressed by a discrete set of signal path solutions that we could evaluate and test. The end result is the customer gets a sensor signal path solution they know will work. They also get a ‘Build It!’ board with that complete solution to expedite their evaluation and prototype development.

“We learned more about how our products are used, the parameters that are important to our customers and why they are important. This is making a difference in how we are developing our next generation products. We also learned that designing development platforms for each of the three initial WEBENCH Sensor Designer tools — pressure sensor, thermocouple sensor and photodiode sensor — is not trivial, especially considering the multiple business units involved and the ongoing introduction of new IC products that must be integrated into each tool. The scope of the project turned out to be huge.”

Christina Nickolas