CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 September 2004
Product News
AWR Announces Microwave Office 2004 For Next-Generation RF and Microwave Designs
Applied Wave Research, Inc. (AWR®), a provider of high-frequency electronic design automation (EDA) tools, announced Microwave Office® 2004 design suite for next-generation radio-frequency (RF) and microwave circuit designs. The latest version of this design system provides RF and microwave engineers with significant improvements in power and usability to increase design accuracy and shorten design cycle time.
"The layout process for RF and microwave design drives overall circuit performance and must be closely connected to electromagnetic simulation tools," said James Spoto, AWR president and CEO. "The Microwave Office solution has revolutionized EDA through the development of an industry-first unified design environment that is inherently synchronized with schematic, simulation, and layout data. This integrated solution provides everything designers need to take an idea from concept through simulation and directly into physical implementation."
Traditionally, a large gap exists in the product development process between the electrical and physical design domains. Microwave Office 2004 software fully integrates three-dimensional (3D) planar electromagnetic (EM) simulation with circuit simulation and layout tools, permitting arbitrary physical structures to be embedded within linear and nonlinear circuit simulations. AWR has improved the capacity of its EMSightT EM simulator by over 5X. The simulator uses a full-wave spectral-domain approach based on the method-of-moments (MoM), and is multi-threaded to take advantage of multiprocessor computers. Through the AWR EM SocketT interface, more third-party EM solvers are integrated with, and directly accessible from, the AWR unified data model, including: Sonnet Software's EM product, Zeland Software's IE3D, MEM Research's EM3DS, Simulation Technology and Applied Research's Analyst, and Optimal Corporation's O-Wave.
The Microwave Office 2004 solution now has a dynamic EM-extraction capability that provides the ability to select schematic elements and target them for simulation using any of the popular EM solvers supported through the EM Socket interface. Users are no longer forced to make design tradeoffs. With Microwave Office 2004 designers can combine the speed of circuit simulation, the accuracy of EM, and the control of the design process, all from within the AWR Design EnvironmentT, while optimizing designs simultaneously with their EM simulator of choice.
"Microwave Office 2004 enables a true layout-driven design methodology that greatly contributes to first-pass design success," said Dr. Simon Mahon, director of MMIC Design at Mimix Broadband, Inc. "The new EM optimization and layout features reduce our design time while increasing the accuracy of our most challenging high-frequency designs."
The Microwave Office 2004 product also offers improvements in harmonic balance simulation, layout, and the user interface (UI), as well as new models. Simulation has been enhanced to more quickly simulate even larger problems. The layout tool supports over 1 million elements and includes an edit-in-place feature. Drag-and-drop optimization goals, 3D graphics, and improved annotations are just some of the UI enhancements that increase design productivity. Model additions include a graphically-defined 3D bond wire model and dynamically generated, symbolically defined devices and arbitrary coupled line models.
Price and Availability
AWR will release the Microwave Office 2004 design suite to customers in Q3 2004. The product supports Windows NT4, 2000, XP, and Linux. U.S. list prices for yearly, time-based licenses range from $8,000-$40,000 depending upon configurations. For more information on product pricing and availability, contact AWR at info@appwave.com or 310-726-3000. For product pricing and availability outside the U.S., please contact AWR or AWR's local sales representative.
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