“The EDA space’s most designer-centric RFIC simulation tool,” claims Keysight

EDA/Electronic Design Automation. American Keysight Technologies has introduced RFPro Circuit, which is described as, "a next-generation radio frequency (RF) simulation tool that targets the complex, multi-physics requirements of today's RFIC (Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits)." Why is this important news in the PLM and EDA field?
For several reasons, but lets first state that the company is above all well known as a manufacturer of electronic test and measurement equipment and software. Within the PLM world, perhaps most people remember the company's recent purchase of the simulation and analysis player ESI Group, which can be seen as a value gauge of Keysight's ambitions to become one of the market's sharpest actors in production environments where electronics and software are key technologies for more and more products. In everything from mobile phones and wireless Internet access to radar and navigation systems, radio frequency (RF) transmissions play a major role in sharpening communicative capabilities. The development dynamics are explosive and as the technology sharpens, RFIC have become complex chips with demanding designs both in themselves and as integrated parts in large system-on-chip (SoC) solutions.
RFICs are designed to operate at high frequencies, typically in the range of several hundred MHz to several GHz, which are frequency ranges suitable for wireless transmission. The purpose of a radio circuit design is to create solutions to transmit and receive signals between the source and the destination with good quality and without high costs. This requires design at a high qualitative and methodological level.
An RFIC typically consists of amplifiers, filters, mixers, oscillators, and modulators/demodulators on a single chip. What Keysight claims to have achieved with the new RFIC is, for example, that automotive and A&D satellite developers get a tool that can contribute to delivering more robust designs and that overcomes performance challenges in tight 3D packagings. Other benefits are that they can take advantage of interoperability and automation to create effectively handle complex workflows.
Joe Civello, director of RF/uW Products, at Keysight EDA, points out in this context that the company has a long and successful history with industry-leading circuit simulation for RFIC and module designers.
“Beyond speed and robustness, we've built RFPro Circuit to be the EDA industry's most designer-centric RFIC simulation tool, striving for flexibility, application orientation, and context awareness across multiphysics, high-performance computing, and integration into major vendor workflows. Designers using RFPro Circuit can accelerate their engineering cycles and shift left through their verification efforts from physical to virtual prototyping. Where it is also both easier and cheaper to fix problems,” he says.