Keysight Technologies, Inc., a leading technology company that provides advanced design and validation solutions to help accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, introduced the new PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) 2023, a integrated design and simulation software that rapidly responds to increasing design complexity and higher frequencies in the radio frequency (RF) and microwave industry.

Keysight’s PathWave ADS 2023 includes electromagnetic (EM) simulation enhancements for circuit designers. It also streamlines the integration of multi-technology circuit assembly and simulation into enterprise Electronic Design Automation (EDA) design workflows. PathWave ADS 2023 enables RF and microwave product development teams to easily manage signal complexity, design densification, multi-technology integration, and frequencies growing to 60 GHz and beyond. As a result, customers can shorten time to market, improve engineering team productivity, and achieve competitive designs.

“PathWave ADS 2023 directly addresses the needs of customers developing high-speed, high-frequency, multi-technology designs,” said Joe Civello, director of RF and microwave simulation at Keysight. “This new solution offers workflow and simulation performance enhancements that accelerate the design and simulation process while providing the analysis results needed to ensure designs meet critical electrical performance requirements and thermal.”

RFPro Electromagnetic Simulation for Circuit Designers

Simulation performance enhancements in RFPro, the interactive EM simulator built into PathWave ADS, enable rapid design tuning and optimization. New RFPro features include:

• Automation of EM circuit co-simulation setup that ensures analysis is easily accessible by circuit designers without the help of an EM expert or the need for invasive layout editing.
• Advanced EM solvers and meshing technologies are accessible through a single unified environment with parallelized simulation acceleration via cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) that supports fast, high-capacity simulation.
• Seamless integration with Cadence Virtuoso, Synopsys Custom Compiler, and Ansys HFSS facilitates enterprise electronic design automation approval workflows.

RF and microwave development environment

Improvements to the PathWave ADS 2023 development environment include:

• 3D multi-technology assembly automation (SmartMount) for routing and verification of densely integrated RF modules.
• Improved management of design databases containing complex multi-technology structures enables correct simulation setup and traceability of designs and simulation data.
• Python and Microsoft Visual Studio scripting, debugging, automating, processing, using, and visualizing complex simulation and measurement data that provides the integration and insights needed to achieve optimal designs that meet multiple performance specifications.

Multi-physics simulation technologies

Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) distortion specification is the new requirement when designing digitally modulated signals in RF and microwave applications. PathWave ADS integrates Keysight instrumentation algorithms for generation of compact test signals and fast EVM distortion calculations to provide EVM simulation support for all circuit-level modulated signals, enabling tuning and adjustment. design optimization. Multiphysics simulation enhancements allow designers to:

• Accurately identify transient temperature rise to create reliable high-power RF components when deployed in the field to prevent costly premature failures.
• Ensure the stability of the power amplifier under all operating conditions. When used with RFPro EM visualization, designers can identify the physical locations and frequencies at which instability occurs to correct for them before building hardware.
• Squeeze what would normally take five days on a single machine into a single day with cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) to perform in-depth simulation and optimization that results in higher throughput and time to market. reduced market.

Proven results in multiple client workflows

Nicholas Saiz, Chief Architect and Co-Founder of TeraDAR, said, “We have fully integrated PathWave ADS into our RFIC design workflow, whether using GoldenGate and RFPro in the Cadence Virtuoso environment or standalone in ADS. . The tool that stood out for us was RFPro, which resulted in significant time and cost savings while providing highly accurate results comparable to other on-chip and traditional EM simulators. The ability to simulate EM blocks Complete RF and automatically generate fully back-annotated schematics gave us an extra level of confidence before each new design. RFPro was instrumental in the success of several early chips at TeraDAR, saving us five to six months in redesign and manufacturing time.

Dr. Xu Zhu, Chief Technology Officer at Menlo Micro, said, “PathWave ADS and RFPro provide us with an end-to-end design and simulation solution for our micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) module workflows. ). We leverage PathWave ADS workflows to automate the development of our MEMS products, from the device wafer level to module integration with other components, as well as PCB design, including l device or MEMS module plus RF connectors. SmartMount makes the integration of different technologies, such as flip chip or wire bonding, on the module substrate and PCB as easy as stacking LEGO blocks. RFPro makes the generation of 3D models, including complex MEMS devices, much faster for our EM analysis.