Microwave Journal
www.microwavejournal.com/articles/6200-agilent-s-ads-2008-update-1-provides-analysis-and-verification

Agilent’s ADS 2008 Update 1 Provides Analysis and Verification

April 29, 2008

Agilent Technologies Inc. announced a 10x speedup of its planar 3-D electromagnetic (EM) simulator, which is part of the Update 1 release of its Advanced Design System (ADS) 2008 EDA software platform. The speed improvement helps RFIC, RF module and high-speed gigabit serial-link designers take advantage of EM simulation for faster, more accurate design and signal integrity verification.


"The cumulative effect of our EM technology improvements means our customers can use our Momentum simulator for accurate, interactive design, and not just for limited sign-off verification," said Jan Van-Hese, EM R&D project manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division. "The 10x speed improvement and meshing accuracy makes EM problem-solving possible for even very large and complex designs."

Momentum is the planar 3-D electromagnetic simulator in ADS 2008. Significant enhancements to its speed and capacity for analyzing large multigigabit serial-link signal integrity, RFIC and RF module design include:

• a fast and memory-efficient solver based on the NlogN matrix compression techniques that tackle problems up to six times larger than previously possible;

• multicore computer use through parallelizing the solve process across all available PC-processor cores;

• distributed simulation over networked computer clusters to perform multipoint EM simulation in parallel; and

• a robust mesher that intelligently pre-processes layouts imported from other systems to guarantee mesh-related simulation accuracy.

Agilent's Advanced Design System is a powerful electronic design automation platform. It offers complete design integration to designers of consumer and commercial wireless electronic products such as mobile phones, wireless networking, GPS; radar and satellite communications systems; and high-speed digital serial links.