Applied Wave Research Inc. (AWR®), a provider of high frequency electronic design automation (EDA) tools, announced RFA™, a system-level architectural planning tool, which provides an advanced radio frequency (RF) budget analysis feature and “frequency heritage inspection” capabilities for next-generation communication design. This new entry-level product is the latest addition to the company’s Visual System Simulator™ (VSS) design suite.
“RFA is an advanced system-level planning and specification tool for RF communication system engineers who need to quickly create and verify the initial specifications of a radio design,” said Joel Kirshman, VSS marketing segment manager. “The product helps find potential pitfalls early in the design process, at the system-level design phase, thus saving significant design cycle time and speeding products to market. RFA has been developed with the same overriding goal as all AWR software products—to provide engineers with the ability to explore design options and gain further insight into their designs so that they can produce quality products efficiently.”
RFA delivers several new technologies that enable communications designers to streamline their product development process. One key component of RFA is the RF Budget Analysis™ feature that provides the ability to make traditional RF cascaded measurements such as gain, noise figure and third-order intercept, inclusive of image noise, along a communication link. The RF Inspector™ technology, another component of RFA, is a new frequency-domain simulation tool that helps determine the root cause or heritage of any inter-modulation product of an RF link and includes the effects of conversions, harmonics, inter-modulation and noise. This enables users to isolate the sources of unwanted interferers and to better architect their RF systems.
RFA, complemented with the power of VSS, enables engineering teams to further analyze and simulate their designs and incorporate complex modulation sources and receivers with the same RF link created in RFA, and, at the same time, use the full suite of capabilities offered in VSS, including error vector magnitude (EVM), eye diagrams and bit error rate (BER).
The RFA product will be available directly from AWR through its direct sales offices and worldwide distribution channels, starting at US $4000 per year depending on configuration. A beta version of the RFA software will be available Q3 2006 and the full production release is scheduled for Q1 2007. The product will be demonstrated at AWR’s booth #308.