RF Antennas

RF designers of today's 5G and IoT smart devices need specialized simulation and optimization technology to develop small-size, embedded phased array antennas with high gain and single-, multi-, and wideband frequency range. Cadence AWR software helps engineers design, optimize, and integrate antennas/arrays, providing powerful electromagnetic (EM) technologies to simulate antenna metrics such as gain, return loss, radiation efficiency, and currents, and to visualize 2D/3D far-field antenna patterns.

Design Starts

To convert bound circuit fields into propagating EM waves, antenna design focuses on developing a structure that emits and/or receives EM waves as efficiently as possible for a specific frequency range and geometric form factor. With the development of high-performance cloud computing, powerful EM analysis, and advanced optimization techniques, engineers can now reliably use EM simulation software to generate physical designs from electrical requirements.

Simulation

EM simulation software allows you to perform analysis and post-processing of antennas and arrays. With fast N*Log(N) solver technology, you can address large, complex arrays that were previously impractical to simulate in their entirety. To study performance, peak antenna simulation should support metrics such as total radiated power, or power in a particular polarization across the “cut” of a radiation pattern as a function of swept frequency or other user-defined swept parameters. 

Optimization

Parameterization enables designers to readily analyze and optimize planar and fully 3D structures over a user-specified range of property values. Combining this capability with EM analysis supports highly accurate performance and yield optimization that addresses manufacturing tolerances affecting performance factors such as efficiency and return loss. In addition, parallel computer processing, in which the problem is distributed to more than one computer, allows antenna designers to explore more design options in less time.

Impedance Matching and Integration

RF circuit simulation and network synthesis tools help antenna designers develop impedance-matching circuits that ensure maximum delivery of power to the antenna from the front-end circuitry. An RF-aware circuit and/or system simulator is critical to investigating the antenna performance in the context of the entire wireless device.

Options

Network synthesis automatically creates two-port, impedance-matching networks for single- and multi-band antennas using proprietary evolutionary EM optimization.

The radar, testbench, and phased array library module provides radar signal generation, radar-specific target and propagation modeling, and radar signal processing capabilities. The library is tailored to give easy access to all the needed capabilities for simulations such as RF interference, antenna arrays, and multipath channels. The types of radars supported span military, medical, weather, automotive, and more.

The phased array antenna generation wizard allows designers to rapidly configure a physical array, assign antenna radiation patterns derived from AWR AXIEM or Analyst EM analysis for the individual antenna elements, and model mutual coupling and edge/corner behavior. The wizard also allows designers to specify link and feed performance, incorporate gain tapering to reduce antenna side lobes, and investigate the impact of element failures on the overall array performance. This provides designers with real-time visualization of far-field radiation patterns from all these user-specified parameters. With the desired array performance, the wizard then automatically generates either a system or circuit-based network for further development or physical realization in Cadence software.