Reducing Size and Loss
Passive components such as couplers, circulators, and attenuators provide critical signal routing, detection, amplitude control, and/or waveform shaping. Couplers are necessary for dividing/combining power in antenna and amplifier feed structures, while attenuators ensure that components such as amplifiers are not driven by excessively large signals. Successful passive component design focuses on reducing the device footprint, costs, and associated insertion losses, while providing increased power-handling capabilities.
Key Benefits
Fast
Accelerate design starts with powerful synthesis of lumped and distributed filter types
Reliable
Accurately predict the response of distributed and cavity-type filters with planar method-of-moments (MoM) and 3D finite-element method (FEM) electromagnetic (EM) analysis
Productive
Directly import synthesized designs into Cadence® AWR® Microwave Office® circuit design software for further refinement, optimization, EM verification, and physical design
Solution Highlights
Design Management
Passive component designs start with the selection of an appropriate semiconductor or PCB technology for the target application, frequency of operation, and performance goals. Physical dimensions for classic distributed designs are dictated by the wavelength of the operating frequency, which can be determined through an RF-aware transmission-line calculator.
Model Support
Libraries of surface-mount technology (SMT) vendor components and distributed transmission-line elements allow designers to build and simulate passive components through a schematic editor fully synchronized to a layout editor for physical realization. Parameterized EM subcircuits can be used for novel structures to develop passive components using custom building blocks.
Simulation
Designers rely on circuit/EM co-simulation along with RF-aware circuit simulation and frequency-dependent transmission-line models to provide embedded parasitic extraction and design verification. Prior to manufacture, component performance can be verified through planar or 3D EM analysis, depending on the geometry of the (packaged) device.
Associated Products
Options
Optional features can be added to AWR RF/microwave design software to enhance engineering productivity, product performance, and speed time to market. From accelerating the initial RF design effort with leading network synthesis tools to significantly reducing simulation and optimization run times with parallel, distributed computing, these options ensure your organization gets the most out of its RF EDA investment and engineering resources.