Once found chiefly in the military and
aerospace domains, printed-circuit
boards (PCBs) with a mélange of analog,
digital, and RF circuitry are now everywhere.
In fact, the wireless telecom and
consumer sectors are embracing them wholeheartedly.
But that doesn’t mean they’ve gotten
any easier to design.
Mixed-technology PCBs are only growing in
density and complexity, encompassing more
layers than ever, multiple power domains, and
greater sensitivity to intra-board interference.
Yet design flows for these challenging PCBs
have largely failed to integrate these various
design domains. They’re worked on in overthe-
wall fashion, with the RF, analog, and
digital design teams isolated from each other.
The result is many iterations as well as longer
time-to-market and lesser quality of results.
It needn't be done this way, or so say Agilent
Technologies and Mentor Graphics. The two
companies emerged from a two-year joint effort
with tight integration of Agilent’s Advanced
Design System (ADS) for RF design and simulation
with Mentor’s Expedition Enterprise or
Board Station XE PCB design flows. The companies
claim the combined flow will result in
design-cycle time savings of up to 50%.
The integration between ADS and either of
the Mentor board-design flows makes communication
between the tools all but transparent.
Designers can start the RF portion of their
board design in either system (more typically
done in ADS), create a schematic and perform
simulations, and then move the design over
to the Mentor flow. The design will appear
exactly the same as it did in ADS. At that
point, engineers can modify the design and/or
alter parameters and then seamlessly return to
ADS for further simulation.
The integration extends to the libraries and
databases used by the two systems. Furthermore,
both Expedition Enterprise and Board
Station XE were enhanced with the ability to
understand RF circuits for what they are. Both
flows now offer full RF design capabilities and
can parametrically create RF shapes (see the
figure). They're able to create circuit meanders
and via stitching for shielding. Also, both
flows can drive the creation of shapes from
the schematic and auto-arrange them into the
end RF circuit.
To facilitate collaborative design across
domains and geographically dispersed teams,
the combined flow leverages Mentor’s Xtreme
technology, which allows for simultaneous
design by multiple engineers over a local-area
network (LAN) or wide-area network (WAN)
with real-time updating of a common database.
Agilent’s ADS, available now, starts at
around $9000. Mentor’s Expedition Enterprise
and Board Station XE flows are also available
now, with prices for either flow starting at
around $9000 as well.
AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES • www.agilent.com/find/eesof
MENTOR GRAPHICS • www.mentor.com/go/pcbinnovation
See associated figure