December 2008

Integrating PCB and Microwave Design: Time to Stop Throwing It Over the Wall
Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing
AWR Corporation

For most of current history, the digital and microwave design communities have viewed each other curiously over a virtual wall (or a cubicle partition), neither one inclined to venture for too long on the other side. Digital designers, accustomed to working at baseband frequencies, have never longed for the opportunity to explore the “black magic” world of high-frequency design. Microwave designers, for their part, have largely ignored digital design because it had little or no relevance to their RF-centric projects.
However, now that analog, digital, and microwave technologies coexist on the same printed circuit board, “ignorance is bliss’” is no longer an acceptable stance, especially with today’s unsettled economic environment in which time and money are at a premium.

Today, “throwing a design over the wall” and letting someone else downstream solve integration problems likely results in either its immediate return or a highly dysfunctional design. Instead, designers seek software solutions that bridge the technologies required to bring their projects to fruition. On this co-design path, two stumbling blocks become painfully obvious: First, the software tools that link printed circuit board (largely digital) and high-frequency (RF and microwave) design are few in number. Second, electronic design automation (EDA) tools in general are fundamentally “closed” to the use or integration of tools from other vendors.

The origin of the first problem (the lack of a seamless link between PCB and microwave design) is easy to see, since clock rates and data throughput have only recently reached multi-gigabit-per second rates, making it necessary to address the issues associated with high-frequency design. The answer is to provide a way for design tools serving the digital, PCB, and microwave domains to merge sufficiently to work together without tedious, time-consuming issues such as file translation.

AWR’s recently-launched AWR Connected for Mentor Graphics Expedition software tool is a good example of how this can be achieved. It provides seamless design flow between the Mentor Graphics Expedition Enterprise printed circuit board (PCB) and AWR Microwave Office microwave and RF design environments and is fully transparent to the user. It creates a useful flow in which libraries are no longer an issue and manual, tedious file translation is eliminated so that co-design between both design domains is practical and can be performed unimpeded. As a result, the time required to move between the domains is reduced nearly to zero.

The second problem is typical of human nature and corporate philosophies in general. Most companies want their customers to use only tools they develop and sell, which makes sense from the perspective of revenue protection and post-sales support, but is illogical and limiting for designers, who just want to get the job done faster and with fewer hassles. The EDA world is hardly unique in this regard, and the music industry, PC software, and semiconductor industries are other good examples.

The answer in this case is for EDA companies to open their software architecture to allow tools - other than their own - to be used to achieve maximum productivity within their design environments. This pursuit of “openness” in the EDA community is largely still in the ‘grass-roots’ stage. However, some progress in this area may be inevitable, since designers faced with extreme time constraints and complex multi-technology design tasks will migrate to tools that best allow them to perform their work.

As testament to this fact, witness the steadily increasing popularity of AWR’s software tools, which benefit from the company’s philosophy of allowing third-party tools to function within the AWR design environment -- even though AWR may have tools that perform similar functions. While such a philosophy might be considered naïve by some, it continues to make AWR’s Microwave Office and other software tools more useful and flexible than is typical in the high-frequency EDA industry.

In short, the realities of product development today make it essential to pull down the longstanding partitions between design environments and point tools. The alternatives are missed schedules, increased cost, and circuits that are not “all they can be”. In the current economic atmosphere, who can afford them?

AWR Corporation
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