Agilent Technologies' EMPro 2009 Improves Integration with Advanced Design System

EMPro 2009 contains both finite-element-method and finite-difference-time-domain EM simulation techniques. Integrated with ADS, it allows design simulation and cross-verification of all types of EM analysis problems without the extra costs, stops and starts that are associated with leaving the design flow to perform analysis with separate, point tools. This integration speeds the overall design and verification process and gets communications products to the marketplace more quickly.

The 3-D EM design environment and solvers in EMPro 2009 are integrated with ADS for fast and efficient RF and microwave circuit design. The software is used to analyze the EM effects of RF and microwave components such as high-speed IC packages, antennas, on-chip embedded passives and PCB interconnects.

This is the industry's first platform that completely integrates 3-D EM simulation and the ADS design environment, said Erwin DeBaetselier, product marketing manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division. Its architecture removes the overhead and expense of maintaining disconnected tools. Our customers can take advantage of a single flow to innovate today's challenging wireless applications, such as those that mix high-density integration of RFIC, packages and RF modules with antenna design.

EMPro 2009 creates parameterized 3-D components for use in ADS circuit and system simulation. This allows designers to use the best available technology in an integrated RF design flow. EMPro 2009 can also calculate 4G antenna diversity for MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) systems and integrate them within a 4G LTE or WiMAX(tm) system verification using the ADS Ptolemy system simulator.

The EMPro design environment also saves design time in modeling imported CAD data. Simulation parameters, parameterization and simplification of the imported components can be set up once in the design cycle and all the following CAD updates can use this same modeling setup. EMPro contains the most popular industry compliance tests, such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-diversity, specific absorption rate (SAR) and hearing aid compatibility (HAC) These tests help eliminate expensive delays and hardware rework during production testing.

Agilent EMPro 2009 takes advantage of multithreading and GPU acceleration for fast EM simulation results that can be immediately used in the overall ADS design and simulation.