RF Design Tools

RF Design tools for RF and PCB parallel design reduce time-to-market, deliver accurate simulation, reduce over-design margins, and enable cross-team collaboration between RF and PCB design teams. With our Advanced RF option, RF circuits can be designed directly in project design or transferred from Keysight ADS and National Instruments AWR. No more schematic black boxes: these are true RF schematics in system-level design. To fully support RF design, the flow was engineered to understand RF, not just translate it.

Today’s PCB designs often include multiple RF modules, with high-speed digital and analog circuitry in tight proximity. Up to 75% of total cycle time can be spent on RF circuits. The combination of engine and modeling technologies enables you to implement a fast, efficient, unified design flow.

Designs for devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wearables will operate in a new spectrum with new enabling technologies. With our RF Design tools, we must address key challenges in RF PCB design for 5G like scalable numerology, higher frequency, and wider bandwidths, MIMO (multiple input, multiple outputs) and beam steering, over-the-air (OTA) testing, and 5G New Radio (NR) coexistence with other wireless communications systems.

Designing PCBs with RF requires design features and capabilities that are specific to RF and you can find in our RF Design tools. RF PCB design requires support for RF-centric design capabilities like:

• Ground stitching vias to shield RF circuits
• Restrictive clearance rules specific to RF
• Automated RF circuit arrangement and grouping
• Meanders
• Via-stitching for easy creation of co-planar waveguides
• Flood regions with vias according to your rules
• The import of complex RF shapes
• Chamfered corners

Our RF Design tools provide you with a product design flow that puts your high-speed RF (IoT) products in a position to be a “first-to-market” company.