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Welcome to this brief demo of what’s new in the 2004A release of Agilent’s Advanced
Design System. This is a shameless product pitch, so to thank you for taking the time
to watch, at the end of this presentation you’ll be able to enter our weekly drawing
for a combination 256K USB memory stick, MP3 player, digital voice recorder. It’s pretty
cool. So, let’s get started.
Our main focus with this release was to improve the ease of use and productivity for circuit
design applications. In other words, we wanted to make common tasks easier to do. The first
task I’ll show you is tuning. I’m going to demonstrate the speed and user interface
improvements we’ve made to tuning with this filter circuit. We will be tuning the variable
X, which scales the values of the Ls and the Cs in this circuit. This is the new tuning
user interface here. The step size, minimum, maximum, and current values of X are shown
in these boxes. As I move the slider, the circuit performance updates in real time.
We are tuning with 80 frequency points and can sweep linearly or logarithmically.
Having the choice of a linear or logarithmic sweep can make it easier to tune rapidly changing
circuits. I’ve been using the slider in continuously varying mode, which can yield
component values with many digits of resolution. Clicking “snap slider to step” forces
the slider to vary only by the step size, which can yield more realistic or manufacturable
values. I can save a trace by clicking “store.” This dialog box allows me to name the memory
trace and automatically include the value of the parameter being tuned. The values are
shown in the plot legend. This is very useful for documenting the effects various component
values have on circuit performance. If I want to tune another component, I can go back to
the schematic and select the component I want to tune. For instance, this capacitor is not
being tuned. To tune it, I just click on it. A slider appears, and now I can move the slider
and vary the value of that capacitor. If I click “update schematic,” the schematic
is annotated with the new tuning parameter value.
This is new. I no longer have to configure tuning every time I want to use it. It’s
saved with the schematic. Now, tuning is not limited to linear simulation. Let’s take
a look at something more complicated. We’ll use this amplifier circuit and perform a DC
and harmonic balance simulation. The parameters we can tune are the gate voltage step size,
the output load resistance, the drain voltage bias point, and the RF input power. What is
displayed is the dynamic load line, the spectral content of the output, and the input and output
waveforms. You can see the spectral content change with input power, the waveforms clipping,
and the changes in the load-line as I tune various parameters. We’re tuning a complex
simulation with a great deal of information being made available, and the results are
displayed in real time.
I could show you tuning a component in a sub-circuit, or tuning using a complex modulation signal
and showing the resulting Eye-diagram, but enough about tuning. Hopefully, you can see
the tuning improvements we’ve made. Another objective of the 2004A release was to improve
the ease of use for new and infrequent users. So, the first thing you notice when you launch
ADS is the new greeting dialog. It asks, “Do you want to create a new project, work on
an existing or recently used one, or open an example project?” It also has a link
to the quick-start manual, and you can easily disable this dialog if you don’t need it.
I’m going to create a new project and name it “filter.” Here, you see the next improvement,
a new schematic wizard that comes-up automatically whenever I launch a new schematic window.
It can be permanently deactivated if I want. By asking a series of simple questions, the
schematic wizard will set-up a schematic page with a simulation and a sample circuit to
get you started. I’ll set-up a simulation. From these various application types, I’ll
choose a two-port application. For a sample circuit I’ll choose a lumped-element low-pass
filter. And we’ll use a linear frequency sweep.
Useful instructions on how to complete the design are shown. I’ll close this window,
and as you can see, a sub-circuit was created and terminated. I’ll select the sub-circuit
and push into it using this button. And you can see the sample circuit here. At this point,
I could modify this circuit or replace it, and begin designing my circuit. To simulate,
I’ll return to the top-level menu and click the “simulate” button here. When the simulation
completes, the pre-configured data display window appears.
So, we’ve launched ADS, set-up a simulation with a sample circuit, and gotten results,
all in a matter of minutes; and it was easy. In addition, you’ve seen how fast ADS is
from the time I click “simulate,” to the time results were displayed. This simulation-button-down-to-data-display-up
time improvement makes the whole product feel more responsive. This table shows how much
faster the 2004A release is compared to the 2003C release on various platforms and for
various circuit sizes. By the way, this table also shows that we now support the Linux platform.
I’m showing here the improvements in linear simulations. As part of an ongoing effort,
harmonic balance simulation times also improved. On this chart, you can see that harmonic balance
simulation times on Windows are about twice as fast, compared to our 2003A release, and
even faster on Unix machines. Speed is not the only improvement we made, and continue
to make on our simulators. In the interest of time, let me just say that we have automated
our transient assisted harmonic balance simulation, improved phase noise analysis to provide a
single, accurate result, have faster Krylov solver times when simulating oscillators,
and have made improvements in memory management that allows simulation of larger circuits
with the direct harmonic balance simulator.
That’s a mouthful, but it gives you some idea of the powerful simulation improvements
we’ve made in this release of ADS. Let me talk, now, about the significant improvements
in layout. We now have a new physical connectivity engine integrated in layout with real-time
interconnect extraction, which means that electrical interconnects are created while
you design in layout. With this capability, you can show the physical interconnections
by clicking on any component, trace, or polygon, to see everything electrically connected to
it. This allows you to quickly find connections and possible errors. The new physical connectivity
engine also improves our check design tool. This tool checks a layout for eight categories
of possible errors, including the two errors shown here: open connections, and shapes touching
but belonging to different nodes. Clicking on the error highlights the problem area of
the layout. I can select “auto-zoom,” and when I click on the error it zooms-in
on the problem component. This is very useful when dealing with large layouts. In this case,
this component is not properly connected, so I’ll move it to connect the nodes. I
refresh the design checker, and we no longer get an error. We also have moved several commonly
used tasks to a new layer selection window that allows you to choose the layers you want
to be visible, which ones you want to be selectable, and to quickly change the current layer by
simply clicking on the layer you want to be active.
There are many more usability improvements in layout, but before we finish I want to
show you a new tool in ADS called “RF system budget analysis.” Budget analysis allows
you to design a circuit using high-level functional blocks such as those shown here. This allows
you to determine, or budget, the performance needed from each component to achieve the
desired system performance. The budget controller in ADS has over 80 budget measurements. If
I double-click on the controller you can see the measurements here in this column, and
select the measurements you want by placing them here in the right-hand column. Budget
analysis results can be output to the data display, where you can see the results of
each component in a table or using a graph. Here, you see the gain and output power of
the filter, amplifier, mixer, filter, and final amplifier. Results can also be output
to an Excel spreadsheet. All of these graphs and tables were automatically created using
an Excel macro that ships with the Advanced Design System.
Let me finish-up by listing just a few more improvements to ADS. You can see the list
of improvements is long, and includes things like better modeling of thick conductors by
our planer electromagnetic simulator, a new UWV OFDM design guide, accounting for self-heating
in the Agilent HBT transistor model, and many more improvements that would be extremely
boring to listen to, but you will appreciate having when designing with the Advanced Design
System.
Well, we’ve reached the end of this brief overview of the ease of use and productivity
improvements in the ADS 2004A release. For more information you can visit the Agilent
EEsof website, or give your local Agilent EEsof salesperson a call. If you’re connected
to the web, you’ll now be taken to a website where you can enter our weekly drawing. Thanks
for listening, and good luck.