Optenni Ltd. announces an improved link between ANSYS® HFSS and Optenni Lab™ for designing matching circuits for antennas and RF components based on 3D models simulated with HFSS. This tight integration is made possible by the new ANSYS® Electronics Desktop™ technology included with HFSS. It delivers a new paradigm for electronic design with highly productive drag and drop dynamic links between electromagnetic field extraction and circuit simulation for easy problem set-up and reliable product performance.

An important challenge in the daily work of antenna design engineers is to ensure that technical specifications are met for antenna impedance bandwidth and efficiency. These characteristics can be enhanced significantly faster and easier using matching circuits than by modifying the antenna’s geometry. Traditionally, designing matching circuits has required special expertise in the areas of impedance matching and circuit simulation tools.

Using a single macro command, impedance results from ANSYS HFSS simulations can be transferred to Optenni Lab for matching circuit generation and other analyses of the simulated impedances. Optenni Lab provides fully automatic matching circuit generation and optimization routines. The user needs to specify only the desired frequency ranges and number of components in the matching circuit after which Optenni Lab provides a choice of optimized matching circuit topologies. Optenni Lab features an intuitive graphical user interface, a comprehensive set of component libraries from leading component manufacturers, fast tolerance analysis and simultaneous multiport matching.

In the new workflow, matching circuits optimized in Optenni Lab can be easily returned to a circuit simulation schematic under the ANSYS Electronics Desktop framework, using a dynamic link to the HFSS simulation model. Thus, it is easy to design a matching circuit in Optenni Lab based on HFSS simulations and co-simulate the matching circuit and the electromagnetic structure on the ANSYS side.

“One of our key strategies has been to build interoperability and links to leading software in the wireless arena. With this new two-way link we are happy to deepen our collaboration and interoperability with ANSYS products,” commented Dr. Jussi Rahola, founder and CEO of Optenni Ltd.

“We see a strong industry need for antenna engineers to quickly synthesize matching networks for antennas and RF components”, said Dr. Matthew Commens, lead product manager for ANSYS HFSS. “The new integrated Optenni-HFSS solution delivers a powerful and seamless flow for matching network design and we are pleased to partner with Optenni, Ltd. to deliver this important new functionality.”

Availability
The link between ANSYS HFSS and Optenni Lab is available immediately, requiring Optenni Lab 3.1 and ANSYS Electronics Desktop 2015. The HFSS macro for implementing the link is automatically installed by the Optenni Lab installer.