Golden Mousetrap Awards Finalist Alert -- Webench

Somewhere right now, an engineer is sweating it out in his cube. With the burden of college a distant memory, the new problem includes a simple LED array, a power supply, and a temperature sensor. The solution to the problem feels eerily reminiscent of a final exam. You know the answers, but they now reside in your gray-murky memory.

Luckily, that engineer has a great tool at his disposal -- Webench. With a few mouse clicks and key entries, a wealth of ideal design solutions is available, featuring components from Texas Instruments. Webench offers efficiency charts, multiple solutions, BOMs, and schematics.

An earlier version of this tool actually saved the day for me on my first job out of college. It's startling to see the exponential change between the latest and the first I ever put to use. Perhaps saving one's job is not always a threat. Webench has always been a go-to web app for my simpler designs. It's quite fitting to see Webench as a Golden Mousetrap finalist, with the live award ceremony taking place in Anaheim, Calif., in the Marriott Ballroom, on February 11, 2014.

TI's Webench is vying to win the Golden Mousetrap Award in the Analysis & Calculation Software category and has some pretty stiff competition from Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division's FloTHERM XT, COMSOL's LiveLink for Excel, and aPriori Inc.'s aPriori 2012r2. Who will win? Attend the live event in Anaheim, Calif. during the Pacific Design & Manufacturing Show on Tuesday, February 11, or check back on DesignNews.com on Wednesday, February 12 to find out!

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