AWR®, an innovation leader in high frequency electronic design automation (EDA), released Version 2008 of its Analog Office design environment targeted for Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) design. Version 2008 includes hundreds of enhancements to the user interface and design flow that dramatically increase user flexibility and productivity.
The user interface of AWR tools is widely recognized as extremely easy to use, and the enhancements within Version 2008 place it even farther ahead of its competitors. For example, features such as project, elements, layout tabs, and the status window are now dockable and floatable, providing a design environment that is fully configurable to suit personal preferences. This new flexibility streamlines design tasks to save time, maximize useable screen space, provide greater insight into the design, and allow more complex designs to be handled more quickly.
Other major enhancements in Analog Office Version 2008 include:
• Capacity: The APLAC® harmonic balance engine delivers better convergence on highly non-linear circuits, circuits with thousands of transistors, and circuits in which the transistors are driven deep into compression. Nonlinear noise analysis is now up to 100 times faster and consumes 90 percent less memory.
• Extraction: Improved extraction flow now enables simulation of interconnects using frequency-domain models in AWR's ACE™ technology in addition to more traditional RLCK extraction. For very-high frequency designs, the same layout can be effortlessly extracted to AXIEM, AWR's new 3D planar EM solver for increased accuracy.
• Verification: AWR's new Precision™ Design Rule Checking (DRC) engine is targeted at the needs of today's complex silicon designs.
The DRC user interface has also been improved to streamline the look and feel of DRC capability whether the engine being used is AWR's Precision, Mentor Graphics' Calibre®, or Cadence Design Systems' Assura™.
Version 2008 of the Analog Office design environment is available now for customers with active maintenance contracts by electronic download on the AWR web site: www.awrcorp.com/download. New licenses are required.