Stop waiting and start designing!Say good-bye to the snail’s pace of manual interconnect, layout and extraction techniques. With AWR’s ACE and iNets technology—for automated interconnect and circuit extraction—you cut out the monotony of hand constructing interconnect, fracturing layout and brute-force EM. Fewer mouse clicks and innovative AWR technology mean shorter process times, right-the-first-time designs, and less stress for you. Don’t you deserve that? Grab your own test copy at www.awrcorp.com/MWO. |
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Aava MobileAava Mobile uses Microwave Office in the design of world's first open mobile device platform. Customer BackgroundAava Mobile was founded in 2009 by a team of engineering wizards with a strong background in mobile phone development who wanted to build an opensource mobile device platform for the OEM/ODM market. Aava Mobile's open devices harness the creativity of developer communities and provide the flexibility to OEM/ODMs and mobile operators to incorporate their own user interface, content and services to differentiate their devices from competitors. The Design ChallengeAava Mobile developed the world's first open mobile device platform. For developers seeking to write Android/MeeGo apps to run on upcoming Intel Atom Z600 smartphones, Aava provides a special software development kit (SDK) that is compatible with current Android/MeeGo SDK software, and also provides a fully-functioning hardware device with working modem/antennae connectivity and other peripherals. We use Microwave Office in our printed circuit board (PCB) designs to simulate the critical tracks/traces and find optimum performance by varying the line widths and PCB ayer stackups. Because we are a young start-up, design time and cycles are critical. AWR's APLAC® models are highly accurate - attributed to years of vetting by Nokia - and as such empowered us with right-the-first-time design of our open mobile device platform PCBs.
Aava Mobile reference device running MeeGo. The SolutionWith Microwave Office, it is possible for us to find the optimum line width to different layers and PCB stackups. Microwave Office enables us to simulate key components/tracks for confidence and to help in tackling performance issues by providing a good starting point for the actual lab work. Our designers have worked with APLAC for over a decade and so were confident about working with APLAC models. Key benefits of Microwave Office for Aava include the software's ease of use, simulation speed, accuracy of models, and innovative technologies. In addition, AWR technical support is outstanding. |
"Because we are a young start-up, design time and cycles are critical and it is important for us to succeed on the first round. The ease-of-use of the software, simulation speed, and accuracy of models in Microwave Office gave us confidence for the first build."
Sami Kolanen
Microwave Office schematics and APLAC simulation results. |
Pocket RadarMicrowave Office Enables First Pass Design Success for World’s Only Pocket-Sized Sports Radar Gun. Customer BackgroundBased in Santa Rosa, California, Pocket Radar™, Inc. designs, engineers and manufactures the world’s only pocket-sized personal speed radar gun that delivers accurate real-time speed measurements with the touch of a button. Utilizing a new breakthrough Doppler radar signal detection and processing system coupled with re-engineered microwave and antenna components that fit into a tiny planar structure the size of a credit card, Pocket Radar employs proprietary digital signal processing algorithms and state-of-the-art intelligent target acquisition techniques to provide users with industry-leading accuracy in speed measurement. Designed for use as a sports radar gun by coaches, players and motorsports fans, Pocket Radar provides full-sized performance in a palm-sized package The Design ChallengeThe Pocket Radar team set out to completely redesign the size and shape of traditional radar guns, opening a new market for a small, low-cost, accurate and convenient product. This required operation at 24 GHz using tiny, low-cost, off-the-shelf components and inexpensive substrates. The first instance of the product was designed through empirical methods and would have required multiple cut-and-try turns to optimize the robust performance of the oscillator and power amplifier and the matching between the two. With very tight budget and time-to-market pressures, rendering multiple board turns with the cut-and try approach was out of the question. Virtual prototyping and design optimization using AWR software was the correct alternative. The SolutionThe tight integration of layout, schematic and EM within AWR’s Microwave Office software environment provides fast design times and even faster test cycles, enabling the successful redesign of the Pocket Radar device. Additionally, the Microwave Office EM extraction capability made capturing the existing empirical design for further simulation at 24 GHz straightforward and easy, and its EM parameterization readily enabled design centering and optimization. Lastly, the software’s oscillator analysis tools provided precise means for understanding and optimization of the oscillator issues. Microwave Office allowed for quick modeling and redesign of the Pocket Radar 24 GH microwave system and first-pass success. |
"The most positive feature of Microwave Office is its constant innovation towards a powerful, highly integrated, accurate and easy-to-use design environment. Microwave Office allowed me to quickly model and redesign the Pocket Radar 24 GHz microwave system and obtain first-pass success."
Phil Jobson
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CREECree Speeds Development of High-Performance GaN Doherty Amplifiers by 70%. Microwave Office Capabilities Provide First-Pass Design Success of Complex 2.1-GHz Circuits.
The Design ChallengeGaN has risen in a few short years from a promising RF power technology to a "must have" in amplifiers for defense applications, and is moving quickly into the wireless arena, currently the domain of silicon LDMOS devices. Cree has long concentrated on making GaN a viable alternative, and to achieve this must create new devices, faster, and at lower cost. The company uses AWR's Microwave Office design environment to bring many of these products to fruition, including all of its hybrid-based GaN power amplifiers. One of the most impressive of these is the CDPA21480 Doherty amplifier (the current power architecture of choice for base station transceivers) that delivers 480 W peak and 80 W average RF power for WCDMA applications in the 2110 to 2170 MHz UMTS band. The SolutionDoherty amplifiers have unique characteristics that when coupled with digital predistortion linearization provide substantial increases in efficiency when driven by signals with high peak-to-average ratios. A Doherty amplifier is actually comprised of two separate amplifiers that function under different signal conditions. By using Microwave Office, Cree's designers were able to optimize the Doherty's performance over a range of power levels using individual source and load pull measurements for both these carrier and peaking amplifiers. The design task was further aided considerably by the software's simulation accuracy as well as the accuracy of its models, which when complemented by Cree's accurate large-signal models reduced design time by as much as 70%. The amplifier design required the use of the full breadth of Microwave Office software's capabilities, from linear frequency-domain and harmonic balance simulation through electromagnetic (EM) analysis. Designers specifically noted the straightforward, seamless approach to the design flow, as well as simulation speed, linking of layout and schematic, and excellent support provided by AWR's support team. "The speed and ease of use of Microwave Office together with the accurate passive component and transistor models allows us to realize first pass design success on the demonstration amplifiers we provide to our customers," said Simon Wood, RF product development manager at Cree. "In addition to reducing our time to market, we are also able to create more designs in a given time, which makes our development engineers more efficient."
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"The speed and ease of use of Microwave Office together with the accurate passive component and transistor models allows us to realize first pass design success. We are also able to create more designs in a given time, which makes our development engineers more efficient."
Simon Wood
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