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From September 2008 High Frequency ElectronicsCopyright 2008 Summit Technical Media, LLC EDA Tool Options
for Advanced High Speed
and Wireless Design
This month’s tutorial
provides a review of EDA
tools available for the
design, simulation and
analysis of advanced
engineering projects
options, this month’s arti-cle looks at recently announced tools and enhancements thatenable engineers to handle specialized, diffi-cult or large and complex design tasks.
Simberian: High Speed Layout Synthesis
Simbeor 2008 from Simberian can synthesize
Simberian Inc. (www.simberian.com) offers low loss, minimal-reflection via hole geome-
Simbeor, a 3D electromagnetic software pack- tries for high speed (tens of GHz) layouts.
age targeted primarily for the analysis of highspeed circuits, in combination with popularprinted circuit board design tools.
internally-generated 3D full-wave models of lines, discontinuities and via holes, plus the ability to synthesize minimal-reflection offers a limited-capability free version for geometries. Unlike the typical—and very evaluation by prospective customers.
time-consuming—method of inputting a stan-dard layout and allowing the EM analysis tool AWR: Filter Synthesis Technology
to perform optimization, Simberian has devel- announced that its Microwave Office high-fre- include such considerations as intermediate quency design suite fully exploits high perfor- metal layers and other physical structures mance filter design synthesis capabilities that affect broadband performance. Users’ can recently released from its partner Nuhertz simply input the desired parameters to obtain Technologies®, whose filter synthesis and a high performance structure for this key por- analysis software, Nuhertz Filter, can be The latest version also includes a synthesis Office software. The new technique, called wizard for either single or differential lines in “delay equalization with off-axis quadruplet a signal or plane layer of a PCB stackup. New and real zeros” reduces from hours to seconds the computation time required to obtain flat dielectrics provide improved accuracy. The software can also do fast linear analysis of a delay equalized lumped element filters.
signal channel, using a combination of its ensure that all frequencies arrive at the same time with-in a filter’s passband is a critical aspect of good filterdesign and is essential in order to obtain distortion-freeperformance. Controlling group delay efficiently has beena major challenge for industry and academia for decades,and many advancements and algorithms have been devel-oped to more efficiently control group delay in band-passfilters by cross-coupling resonators.
Agilent: Prototype PC Board Collaboration
Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com) and T-Tech (www.t-tech.com) have announced a joint agreement tooffer a solution for fast RF printed circuit board (PCB)design, verification and fabrication. The collaboration Thermal and fluid flow (airflow) analysis allowed one
combines Agilent’s Genesys RF and microwave circuit company to identify and implement design changes
design and verification software with T-Tech’s Quick to increase the efficiency of solar panel installations.
Circuit System for PCB prototyping. The combination isexpected to represent the industry’s first complete PCBdesign, verification and prototyping solution.
Flovent simulates the absorption and reflection of solar Agilent’s Genesys is an integrated EDA software plat- energy by the panels, the transfer of heat to aluminum form for RF and microwave designers and workgroups.
profiles and the surrounding air, etc. In particular, exam- From initial system architecture through final documen- ining the flow of air under the photovoltaic panels showed tation, Genesys provides state-of-the-art performance in a that the size of the passageway was constricting the flow single, easy-to-use design environment that is fast, pow- of air. Increasing the depth of the profile that supports the photovoltaic panels and re-running the simulation T-Tech’s Quick Circuit System is a rapid-prototyping demonstrated that the increased airflow reduced the tem- solution used in the fabrication phase of circuit board pro- perature of the photovoltaic panels.
totypes. By bringing prototyping methods in-house, itenables engineering teams to save both time and money.
CST: Parallel Computation for Large Problems
The Quick Circuit can drill, mill and route traces and Computer Simulation Technology (www.cst.com) offers spaces as fine as 0.100 mm/.004 inches, making it ideal a major performance enhancement for the CST for producing analog, digital or RF/microwave prototypes.
MICROWAVE STUDIO® time domain solver. A paral-lelization based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) Flomerics: Thermal Analysis
has been implemented in version 2009 which enables The importance of the operating environment—micro users to solve extremely large problems by employing and macro scale—has become increasingly important for computer clusters, thus extending the boundaries of 3D all wireless, microwave, high speed digital and optical equipment. The highest performance systems require Design engineers involved in the simulation of very attention to all aspects of their operation. Flomerics complex and detail rich structures, such as multilayered (www.flomerics.com) offers thermal and fluid flow design PCB boards or electrically large structures, will benefit most from CST’s latest development. By decomposing the For example, Schueco, a leading producer of photo- calculation domain into several parts and distributing voltaic panels, recently used Flomerics’ Flovent computa- these parts to computers in a cluster, the simulation of tional fluid dynamics (CFD) software to redesign its prod- models with many hundreds of millions of mesh nodes ucts to improve their thermal performance so that 15% to becomes feasible. CST is working to ensure that the lat- 20% more panels can be used in a given space (see photo).
est hardware developments are available to its customer Photovoltaic panels present a major thermal design chal- base at all required levels: for workstations, through its lenge since every degree Centigrade of temperature rise collaboration with Intel®, and GPU hardware accelera- reduces the power produced by 0.5%. “The CFD results tion is offered through the partnership with Acceleware.
helped us understand exactly how the panels were being Memory limitations on GPU accelerator cards make clus- heated and guided us as we made major improvements to ter computing of particular interest when model sizes the design,” said Hamid Batoul, Technical Director of exceed 96 million mesh nodes. The CST MWS MPI based Solar Department, Schueco International, Paris, France.
parallelization runs on homogenous Windows or Linux Batoul uses Flovent to model complete solar systems.

Source: http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Archives/Sep08/HFE0908_Tutorial.pdf