Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1534120
50 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2025 Most RF design engineers use a specialized tool such as Microwave Office to perform the electrical/layout design and circuit simulation operations, whereas layout designers tend to think in terms of how best to place and route components for manufacturing and to con- verse real estate. Aside from the "tall skinny" engineer who might wear both a layout and electrical design hat, simulation isn't neces- sarily the layout engineer's primary concern unless they get into post-layout signal integrity analysis. For those users, we have integrated EM and signal integrity solutions such as Clar- ity and Aurora into our Allegro X platform for in-design analysis. Our target end user is the engineer who understands RF design and is focused on developing high-frequency products from scratch or perhaps performing EM verification on a PCB that was designed by the layout engi- neer. With RF design being so specialized and dependent on physical design, it is more prac- tical for EDA vendors to incorporate advanced layout functionality into their RF design platform where the engineer who knows design principles, RF simulation, plot- ting, and parametric optimiza- tion is responsible for the layout details that impact performance, as opposed to incorporating RF design and simulation function- ality into the layout design plat- form where RF expertise is less prevalent. What RF functionalities are your customers asking for? Responding to the needs of our customers, our soware devel- opers and product engineering team have worked hard to make the soware as user-friendly as possible through design auto- mation, wizards that walk users step-by-step through multi-step processes, as well as scripting such as Python that allow the end user to develop their own custom automation. e focus of our soware development has been in three areas: 1. A user-friendly environment that pro- vides the RF engineer with all the func- tionality to define a physical design, simulate its RF behavior, and generate the file format used for manufacturing, either DXF or Gerber for a PCB, GDSII for an IC. 2. As part of the design verification effort, which is increasingly a must for high-fre- quency designs to ensure accurate simu- lation results, we have focused on inte- grating high-performance, multi-physics (EM/thermal) solvers that offer best-in- class performance for speed, accuracy, and ability to address large problems. Designers can use the platform that is best suited to their particular discipline, while accessing a common solver among different design groups.