Mentor Graphics Corp., a leader in printed circuit board (PCB) design solutions, and Agilent Technologies Inc., a leader in radio frequency (RF) design solutions, announced a jointly developed solution that can significantly improve productivity for the design of RF circuits on printed circuit boards. The industry-first solution is expected to cut PCB design cycle times in half and improve the quality of mixed-technology designs.

This tightly integrated solution enables PCB mixed-signal designers (RF, analog and digital) to concurrently design a PCB using Mentor’s Expedition Enterprise™ or Board Station® XE flows and seamlessly integrate it with Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS) EDA software for RF design and simulation.

“System designs have evolved to the point where digital, analog and RF on the same PCB for wireless, handheld and telecom industries is the norm,” said Henry Potts, vice president and general manager of Mentor’s Systems Design Division. “Designing these mixed-technology systems requires tight integration of the physical layout environments and their respective simulation tools to insure optimized performance and short design cycle times. While Mentor Graphics is the leader in signal integrity simulation for digital PCBs, a collaboration with Agilent to integrate its RF specialized tools with the Mentor PCB systems design flows will provide our customers with capabilities needed to solve the complex multi-mode system issues they encounter today.”

“Customers tell us they face delays in product development due to a disconnect between RF design and simulation and PCB implementation,” said Jim McGillivary, vice president and general manager with Agilent’s EEsof EDA division. “My team’s commitment to problem solving and working with Mentor has resulted in this efficiency breakthrough, eliminating the delays that come from switching between software tools. We fully expect this new integration to cut our customers’ typical product development cycle in half.”

“We spend three months or more in an eight-month development cycle writing custom code to move RF layouts from ADS to Mentor,” said Tom Gray, spectrum analyzer project engineer with Agilent who is also a customer. “We also have a dedicated person whose sole role is to accurately move designs from ADS to Mentor. Dynamically linking ADS with Expedition could cut development time by as much as half and provide significant cost savings.”