RF&WirelessBlog

Call for papers issued for 4th Microwave and Radar Week

The organizing committee of 4th Microwave and Radar Week (MRW-2010) has issued a call for papers for the two conferences that comprise the event. MRW-2010 will take place on 14 – 18 June 2010 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Full papers must be submitted by 15 January 2010, with full details of topics and important dates available on the Websites of the conferences, the 18th International Conference on Microwaves, Radar, and Wireless Communications (MIKON-2010) and the 11th International Radar Symposium (IRS 2010).

Ansys releases version 5.0 of RF and signal integrity tools suite - Ansoft Designer with Nexxim

Ansys has announced the release of Ansoft Designer 5.0 and Nexxim 5.0 products, the latest version of its engineering simulation platform and integrated technology, which supports what it calls 'Simulation Driven Product Development' of electronic products. New features in these latest versions that are designed to shorten the electronic design and analysis cycle include links with Ansys DesignXplorer software that enable design of experiments, sensitivity studies and six-sigma design. Additionally, a distributed-solve high-performance computing (HPC) capability has been added, which allows engineers to analyze process variations within a full signal integrity (SI) analysis across a network of computers. For RF and microwave design, Ansoft Designer 5.0 with Nexxim 5.0 feature a new system simulation engine that allows engineers to simulate entire wireless systems while linking to a library of accurate transistor and electromagnetic models.

Race is on to prove LTE performance

With the milestone dates for LTE deployment in 2010 looming rapidly closer, a number of companies are vying to give the first demonstrations of end-to-end operation to the LTE standard. Often these use software or test equipment hardware to emulate various parts of the system, but nonetheless the performance is there now and it is real.

This week Cadence has shown a protocol testing solution that enables early validation of LTE designs by using its emulator in conjunction with a Rohde & Schwarz (R&S) wideband communication tester – a combination that allows engineers to test wireless designs much earlier in the design cycle than would otherwise be possible. At the same time Aeroflex has announced that this week's ITU Telecom World 2009 will feature a demonstration by China Mobile and Motorola that will use the Aeroflex TM500 LTE test mobile as part of China Mobile's TD-LTE booth demonstrations.

CST previews new features of CST STUDIO SUITE 2010

At last week's EuMW, CST Computer Simulation Technology was previewing CST STUDIO SUITE 2010, the latest release of its integrated design environment, including an entirely new multi-physics product called CST MPHYSICS STUDIO. The flagship module CST MICROWAVE STUDIO (CST MWS) has also added an efficient algorithm that enables sensitivity analysis for several parameters in a single simulation run, and a range of new electromagnetic solver options, features and functionality.

The CST 'complete technology concept' offers different solution options within the same design environment, and now includes an asymptotic solver based on the Shooting Bouncing Ray method, an extension to physical optics.

RF EDA and T&M consortium launches open standard for data exchange

A group of leading names in RF & microwave EDA and test and measurement has formed under the title OpenWave Forum (OWF) to collaborate on the creation and promotion of a unified and transparent data exchange format for large-signal simulations, measurements and models. The founder members of the Forum are Anritsu, AWR, HFE, Mesuro, NMDG, Rohde & Schwarz and Tektronix.

The availability of a wide range of large-signal transistor models is crucial to RF and microwave design, especially in the field of power amplifiers, where the models are expected to work with both steady-state and transient circuit simulators over wide ranges of operating frequency and bias conditions. However measuring data and extracting parameters is far from trivial, and the resulting models are not always robust.

AWR releases Microwave Office 2009

AWR has announced that Version 2009 of its Microwave Office design suite is currently in beta release, and will be commercially available in Q3/Q4 2009. Earlier this year AWR had also announced the integration of Microwave Office into Anritsu's latest network analyzer (VNA). AWR Connected for Anritsu made Microwave Office a standard component of Anritsu's VectorStar MS4640A vector network analyzer, the world's first microwave instrument to integrate a full suite of design tools within its firmware.

The latest release of AWR's flagship product features new Multi-Rate Harmonic Balance (MRHB) technology that AWR says can dramatically increase the speed, and reduce the computer memory required to perform steady-state analysis of complex nonlinear systems with multiple signal sources.

Taisto Tinttunen, chief director of engineering of AWR's APLAC division, explained the limitation of previous tools and the significance of MRHB: "Harmonic-balance engines traditionally do not scale well as the number of tones increases, so simulating a complete receiver or high-speed digital circuit was extremely difficult or impossible because of the high computational cost of nonlinear model evaluations and the extensive memory utilization."

"MRHB eliminates this limitation by defining harmonic balance analysis on a block-by-block basis, reducing filtered sources and their harmonics by defining new hybrid tones based on linear combinations of the source tones," he continued. "As a result, AWR's MRHB technology makes it possible to simulate designs that were previously beyond the reach of the harmonic balance technique, and provides a 5x speed increase when simulating large, complex multi-tone designs."

The other new features of Microwave Office Version 2009 include expanded support for Open Access (OA) Process Design Kits (PDKs), enabling an interoperable design flow among EDA vendors, foundry partners and their customers by employing a standard format. Constant output power simulation means that many power-related measurements are better specified and analyzed because output power is set to a fixed level rather than varying the input power, thus reducing manual post-processing steps and hence the number of simulation iterations.

The Microwave Office software environment now effectively handles data formats from both Maury Microwave and Focus Microwaves, providing enhancements to the software's load-pull analysis, which had been requested by AWR customers, and includes the ability to add or remove load-pull data points directly on the Smith Chart.

Also new is behavioural model support for Mesuro's active load-pull system and "Waveform Engineering," pioneered at Cardiff University, which enables the replication of S-parameter concepts within the nonlinear domain. This feature simultaneously measures the actual current and voltage at a device under test, allowing designers to view and engineer their waveforms to match theory. A behavioural model, called a "Cardiff model", can be thus be extracted and invoked within the Microwave Office Design Environment, allowing modelling and design engineers to characterize their devices or power-amplifiers fully for any signal and impedance environment.

A customizable project tree, which can reconfigure nodes to allow better organization of large projects supporting hundreds of schematics and graphs, has also been added to Microwave Office 2009, along with a number of other improvements throughout the design environment designed to increase productivity and enrich the user experience.