Agilent Technologies Inc. announced breakthroughs in its core electronic design automation (EDA) frequency-domain simulation technologies for fast and accurate RFIC, MMIC, and RF system-in-package (SiP) design. Simulation speed improvements of up to 50 times have been achieved for large and complex circuits used in wireless communications products and aerospace and defense applications.

In RFIC, MMIC and RF SiP development, a single design iteration can cost up to a million dollars. The simulation technology breakthroughs in Agilent's EDA software will help eliminate these costly iterations by allowing designers to quickly and accurately predict performance prior to fabrication.

"Our customers' designs are continually becoming larger and more complex, so we have been investing heavily in our core RF simulation technology," said Larry Lerner, research and development manager of Agilent's EEsof EDA Division. "Based on early reactions from customers, these investments are paying off substantially."

Customers have observed excellent results with test circuits containing thousands of transistors, such as transceiver ICs for wireless local area network (LAN) applications. Extracted view simulations, which include additional physical components that represent IC parasitics, have been successfully completed on circuits containing hundreds of thousands of these components. In some cases, these circuits could not be simulated with previous technologies. Now, these very large and highly complex circuits simulate and converge quickly, even when using default simulation settings.

Agilent's enhanced simulation technologies will be included in the company's next release of its Advanced Design System (ADS) and RF Design Environment (RFDE) simulation software packages. Agilent ADS offers a complete set of system and circuit simulation technology and instrument links for RF and microwave design in a single, integrated flow. Agilent RFDE is an RF EDA software environment that tightly integrates leading RF simulation technologies from Agilent ADS into the Cadence Design System industry-standard analog and mixed-signal design flow.

The enhanced simulators in ADS and RFDE are expected to be available to selected beta-test customers beginning in June 2005. More information about how designers can participate in beta code evaluation is available at www.agilent.com/find/eesof-betatest.

Additional information about Agilent's EDA products and applications is available at www.agilent.com/find/eesof.