Microwave Engineering Europe - December 2007 - (Page 40) 40 PRODUCT FOCUS — EDA Enhanced 2008 version EDA software improves productivity throughout the design flow Agilent Technologies’ Advanced Design System 2008 delivers faster communications product design and demonstrates dramatic productivity improvements for typical design tasks n the design of high-frequency communications products, simulation speed, while very important, is no longer the primary barrier to faster product development. Along with advanced simulation technology, EDA software must support a complete and efficient design flow from conceptual design to implementation, verification, and artwork generation for manufacturing. The flow requires frequent and repetitive steps to enter, view, simulate, and manipulate the components of a design’s schematic and layout representations. By significantly reducing the number of required actions for each step, whether mouse clicks or data entries, designers can gain productivity. The latest release of Advanced Design System (ADS) 2008 from Agilent EEsof EDA includes user-interface-based productivity enhancements to help make software-tools integration seamless for common and emerging design applications. Improving productivity for everyday tasks — the new GUI Agilent’s Advanced Design System 2008 has adopted the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is used by popular internet search engines and applications. The new GUI has opened the door to breakthrough ease of use and productivity gains, and will carry RF, microwave, high-speed digital and mixedsignal designers into the future with its modern features and widespread adoption. For example, new design projects require that all parts of the design are managed efficiently. Designers depend on the EDA software to organize and keep track of different versions of designs, sub-networks, and test benches. Advanced Design System 2008 can create copies of designs and subnetworks in one step, so that design versions can be archived and backed up. You can also use it to copy to another project, while keeping track of which version was copied. The new user interface in Advanced Design System 2008, automatically renames copies I Figure 1: Build complex designs using drag and drop from the new Project View in Advanced Design System 2008. Figure 2: Translucent fill patterns improve visibility of complex multi-layer structures. of designs and optionally all of their subnetworks in one step. New designs are composed of subnetworks. To make it easy to build up new designs by re-using existing designs and proprietary intellectual property, ADS 2008 allows you to simply drag and drop subnetworks from the project view directly into a schematic or layout (Figure 1). The EDA “design space,” whether a schematic representation or a layout leading to manufacturing or production, can be a complex system of many components, structures, and packages. Efficiently navigating this space is essential to productivity. Several improvements to Advanced Design System 2008 provide this efficiency. Zooming into and out of a view is accomplished using the scroll wheel on your mouse. The view may be moved or panned using the mouse or through the keyboard arrow keys. For visualizing all the layers in a stack-up of multi-layer structures, such as is common in System-in-Package (SiP) designs, ADS 2008 contains translucent fill patterns, adjustable from 0 to 100 percent. Because designs with multi-layer structures are increasingly important, ADS 2008 contains features for faster loading from memory and display of these complex structures (Figure 2). Designers of Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs), SiPs, or RF Modules and RF circuit boards depend on having a highly capable layout tool that provides easy build-up of complex structures such as interconnected traces across multiple Microwave Engineering Europe ● December 2007 ● www.mwee.com 040_041_MWEE.indd 40 22/11/07 11:35:05 http://www.mwee.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.