Agilent Technologies' SystemVue Smashes Validation Barriers for Emerging Wireless Circuit Designs

Until now, wireless communications architects have lacked the accurate commercial modeling formats needed to qualify the system-level performance of their RF/analog and mixed-signal CMOS transceiver designs. Agilent's GoldenGate and SystemVue environments now connect in two ways to help system-on-chip designers meet the challenging requirement of ETSI LTE/LTE-A and other emerging wireless standards, via an exclusive, fast circuit envelope (FCE) model or direct envelope-level cosimulation.

The new FCE models execute 1,000 to 100,000 times faster than the original RFIC physical designs, with virtually no loss in accuracy at the system level. Unlike indirect commercial modeling approaches, the new FCE models can account for nonlinear memory effects and are generated from the RFIC design itself, with little human intervention or coding. They can also account for frequency- and power-dependence, frequency translation, multiple ports and internal nodes, and can be exported at various settings of control states, bias voltages, process corners, temperatures and impedance loading.

The new FCE models run natively in SystemVue, as part of the W1719 RF System Design Kit. For challenges that require dynamic behaviors and the highest possible analog accuracy at the system level, a direct cosimulation mode is also available.

Agilent's new modeling technology breaks down design flow barriers for enterprise-level wireless IC designers, said Paul Colestock, product manager for Agilent's GoldenGate products. With no programming, you can quickly verify a whole functional chain against instrument-grade reference IP using calibrated, bottom-up models that come out of your existing design flow.

SystemVue 2011.03 also unveils new wireless capabilities for Spectrasys, the spectral domain simulator at the heart of SystemVue's RF System Architect personality.

Wireless architects love the natural use model of Spectrasys and asked that we expand it to address challenging, modern transceiver designs, said Frank Ditore, product manager for Agilent's SystemVue products. With the new wireless capabilities in SystemVue, our enterprise customers can now achieve superior partitioning and verification by applying Spectrasys to multiband architectures, zero IF, MIMO, phase noise, and even X-parameters* from other tools, and bringing those RF effects up to the system level.

Support for Wideband and Emerging Communications Standards

SystemVue 2011.03 introduces several baseband verification libraries for algorithm developers, which integrate naturally into the wireless IC verification flow enabled by Agilent GoldenGate. They include:

W1918 LTE-Advanced baseband verification library, the EDA industry's first shipping support for the 3GPP Release 10 physical layer.
W1917 WLAN baseband verification library, which supports 802.11ac modulated sources, as well more mature support for 802.11a.
W1916 3G baseband verification library, for legacy support of CDMA, CDMA2000, WCDMA, and HSUPA for multi-format radios.
ISDB-T, which is included in the W1914 DVB-x2 library as an upgrade.
Custom OFDM, a general-purpose OFDM block set included with the SystemVue platform for prototyping new communications formats.