News

11 December 2009

 

TriQuint simulates entire MMIC using AWR’s AXIEM 3D planar EM solver

High-frequency electronic design automation (EDA) software tool provider AWR of El Segundo, CA, USA says that RF front-end product maker TriQuint Semiconductor Inc of Hillsboro, OR, USA has used its AXIEM software to simulate an entire monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) non-uniform distributed power amplifier (NDPA) on a quad-core PC with 4 Gbytes of RAM and a 32-bit operating system. This is first time the firm has been able to electromagnetically simulate an entire structure of this size on a desktop PC.

Electronic warfare (EW) systems require MMIC amplifiers that deliver high power over broad bandwidths with high efficiency, for which TriQuint's NDPA approach is well suited, says AWR. However, designing such complex devices requires accurate electromagnetic (EM) data up to the fifth to seventh harmonic frequency, which results in a very large mesh/matrix of up to 32 ports and 30,000 unknowns. As a result, solving the entire structure has not been practical using available EM solvers, says AWR.

However, the firm says that AXIEM’s near-linear scaling allowed TriQuint to simulate the entire NDPA MMIC from DC to 120GHz in under 2 minutes per frequency. It adds that the achievement was made possible by AXIEM’s shape pre-processor and hybrid adaptive meshing algorithms, which shrank the final mesh size to just over 6000 unknowns. The MMIC demonstrates saturated RF output power of 9–15W over a broad frequency range of 1.5–17GHz with power-added efficiency greater than 20%.

See related items:

AWR offers upgraded PDKs for UMS PH15 and PH25 GaAs MMIC foundry processes

AWR offers RF small-signal design kit for NXP’s SiGe:C BiCMOS

AWR adds TriQuint’s devices to Microwave Office software

Search: AWR EDA TriQuint MMIC

Visit: www.awrcorp.com

Visit: www.triquint.com