Mentor and Agilent Team Up on RF Design Tool
Published: 07 April 2008
by Staff
WILSONVILLE, OR and SANTA CLARA, CA – Mentor Graphics Corp. and Agilent Technology Inc. announced the release of a jointly developed design tool that will improve productivity for the design of RF circuits on PCBs.
Cycle time reduction of 50% is expected along with an improvement in mixed technology designs. This integrated solution targets mixed-signal designers, enabling RF, analog and digital designs to be worked on concurrently using Mentor’s Expedition Enterprise or Board Station integrated with Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS) EDA software for RF design and simulation.
“We spend three months or more in an eight-month development cycle writing customer code to move RF layout from ADS to Mentor,” says Tom Gary, spectrum analyzer project engineer with Agilent who is also a customer. “We also have a dedicated person whose sole role is to accurately move designs from ADS to Mentor. Dynamically linking ADS with Expedition could cut development time by as much as half and provide significant cost savings.”
According to Mentor and Agilent, this new tool will enable the next generation of designers, removing the often tedious and error prone manual operation of RF design and simulation and replacing it with a seamlessly integrated tool that will improve the commercialization process for mixed-signal designs. The automation and linking of the mix-signal design environment will reduce time to market, lower overall design cost and reduce risk through the reduction of respins.
