I mentioned in an earlier post about a nifty little program call QLED being distributed by Future Lighting Solutions that does 3D thermal modeling of high power LEDs and Heat sinks, both passively and actively cooled. It sounded neat and based on the demos in the video I thought I'd check it out.

As usual you have to register to download and request a license file via email. So far so good. I got the license in about a day and was able to play with it for awhile and I was impressed generally by the features and relatively intuitive interface. I say relatively only because it didn't pass the "can I do something useful without resorting to RTFM?" test. My first pass through the solution wouldn't converge and it locked up. After going through the tutorials I found the error of my ways and got it to work.

Now for the bad news........... I noticed while running the program that the license was only good for 6 days. Something never mentioned in any of the links to the program, registration page or information when requesting a license. If it sounds too good to be true...... well you know the rest.
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In a homage to my favorite "blogger", Bob Pease I am titling my first entry on electronic design after his famous catch phrase. If you aren't familiar with Bob's work, he has been writing his own form of Blog (heretofore known as a Column) Pease Porrige in the pages of Electronic Design Magazine for some 18 years.

Bob has forgotten more about analog design than I or most engineers will ever know. Starting out at Philbrick Researches in the early 1960's designing discreet transistor Op-Amps , Bob later moved to National Semiconductor where he remains today, responsible for many of their analog product designs in production for over 2 decades. He brings his years of analog design expertise to his articles with a lot of humor and anecdotes of dealing with customers, management and technical problems for almost 40 years. I encourage you to go look at the article archive which contains his articles dating back to 1990. Bob is also the host of a video webcast called Analog By Design produced by National Semiconductor available in both streaming video and podcast form.
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