Santa Rosa, CA. Keysight Technologies Inc. has announced the launch of two electromagnetic (EM) software solutions designed to help signal-integrity (SI) and power-integrity (PI) engineers improve high-speed link performance in printed-circuit-board (PCB) designs. The solutions—SIPro and PIPro—will be available in the newest release of Keysight EEsof EDA’s Advanced Design System (ADS) software. Keysight will demonstrate the SIPro and PIPro solutions at DesignCon 2016 in Santa Clara January 20-21. Keysight is a host sponsor of the event.
SIPro uses an innovative new composite EM technology that delivers high-frequency accuracy, together with the speed and capacity required for densely-routed cutting-edge PCB design. When compared to gold-standard finite-element method (FEM) simulations, SIPro demonstrates very good agreement at a small-fraction of the time and memory consumption, even above 20 GHz.
The PIPro solution is a collection of three PI-specific simulation engines for DC IR drop, AC power delivery network (PDN) impedance, and power-plane resonances analysis. The DC IR drop simulator provides a table of DC voltages and currents for each via, pin, sink, and voltage regulator module in the PDN, enabling SI/PI engineers to predict DC voltage at the pins of the ICs sinking the current. With the visualization of voltages, current density, and power dissipation on the power and ground nets, engineers can easily identify trouble-spots in the design. The AC PDN impedance analysis calculates the frequency dependency of the PDN with decoupling capacitors in place. With power plane resonance simulation, the self-resonant frequencies of the layout are identified and the electric and magnetic fields visualized to better understand where resonances are originating.
SIPro and PIPro solutions feature a new analysis environment with a native 3D viewer that enables designers to visually inspect nets prior to simulation and view post-processed field visualizations in 3D. The EM setup is completely net-driven, allowing designers to select only those nets they want to simulate, with no time or engineering effort required to manually edit or manipulate layout objects before simulation. With this new workflow, designers can go from layout to results in less than 20 clicks.
“Design engineers have to overcome amazing design challenges to deliver multi-gigabit data rates in the network infrastructure and devices we touch daily,” said Todd Cutler, vice president of Keysight EEsof EDA. “We expect these devices and systems to just work, but behind the scenes there’s an incredible amount of simulation and analysis required to produce reliable links. This release of ADS raises-the-bar on performance, accuracy, and efficiency, for simulation and analysis of signal and power-integrity design tasks; giving engineers the capabilities they need to address their toughest design challenges in the fastest way possible.”
ADS’s cohesive new workflow for SI and PI design tasks automatically generates schematics to prepare EM models for immediate use with ADS’s channel, DDR bus, and transient simulators. With these simulators, designers can conduct SI analyses (such as BER contour measurements) and complete their design verification with standard-specific compliance test benches. Also new in ADS 2016 is a PAM-4 simulation capability that allows system designers to use PAM-4 IBIS-AMI models within the ADS Channel Simulator. The introduction of this capability further advances Keysight EDA’s leadership position in IBIS-AMI SerDes channel simulation.
Keysight EDA’s new SIPro and PIPro solutions will be available in ADS 2016 and is scheduled for release in February.
More information about the SIPro and PIPro solutions is available at www.keysight.com/find/eesof-ads-sipro and www.keysight.com/find/eesof-ads-pipro.
