As you probably know already, Cadence recently acquired AWR from National Instruments. I sat down with Sherry Hess to learn more about AWR's history and product line, and generally get a bit more color on AWR. The big picture is that AWR's tools are used for the design of the front-end electronics used in communication systems (radios) and radar, mostly implemented as MMICs in III/V semiconductor materials such as GaAs and GaN, RF/mixed-signal PCBs, and multi-chip modules. The AWR Design Environment platform is very different from silicon IC tools (especially digital silicon) since RF design is a highly interactive effort, involving specialized models and analyses, significantly lower transistor counts (1-100s), and is greatly impacted by layout.

History

AWR was founded in 1994 by Joe Pekarek, a microwave designer at Hughes who was frustrated with the available RF design software. Through a Hughes-sponsored PhD program, Joe developed an early version of what would eventually become part of AWR's software as part of his thesis. He then founded AWR (Applied Wave Research) along with other colleagues. The new company and its flagship product, Microwave Office, made early converts with its intuitive user interface, integrated schematic capture/layout capabilities, and the introduction of an innovative design aid, namely real-time tuning.

While continuing to grow, the company was acquired by National Instruments in 2011, as part of NI’s effort to expand its expertise into the RF/wireless industry. Eventually, NI and Cadence began strategizing on how to work together to best address the technical challenges stemming from the rapidly evolving 5G communications, IoT, and aerospace industries, to name but a few. As an initial project, NI worked closely with Cadence and AWR's AXIEM was integrated into our Virtuoso RF environment in 2018. I wrote about this integration back then in my post RF Design with Cadence Virtuoso and National Instrument's AXIEM.

AWR's customers come in all sizes and from all market sectors that are incorporating wireless technology, from aerospace and defense to telecommunications equipment. One area where Sherry says AWR expects considerable growth will be with enterprise-sized companies. She sees the AWR acquisition by Cadence as a big positive in this area, since Cadence is already engaged with many of these companies, and AWR will help fill in Cadence’s RF/microwave design creation and integration product portfolio.

There are also a lot of installations in academia since it installs in five minutes and runs on a PC, which makes it perfect for professors to pick it for use along with a microwave design course. One such academic is Alan Victor at North Carolina State University:

As a principal engineer developing MMIC devices, I mentor students in an undergraduate senior design class. My students design an LNA and a microwave PA using AWR software. Needless to say, this is a challenge for students. However, the software’s ease-of-use enables them to succeed.

Product Portfolio

The AWR product portfolio operates within the AWR Design Environment platform as one integrated interface for design entry (schematic/layout), analysis (system/circuit/EM), optimization, yield analysis, and result plotting.  The company’s flagship product, Microwave Office, is an RF circuit simulator used to develop front-end components such as power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers, filters, mixers, and so on. AXIEM is a method-of-moments (MoM), 3D planar electromagnetic analysis tool used for characterizing (S-parameters) passive structures and RF interconnects. AXIEM is integrated into both Microwave Office and Virtuoso RF. There is also a tool called Visual System Simulator (VSS), which supports communication/radar system-level development using RF and DSP blocks based on behavioral models. VSS supports many system analyses (budget, ACPR and EVM, cascaded noise, IP3, spectrum), component specification/validation, and architectural design. With its standards-compliant libraries and test benches, VSS can be used, for example, for testing devices excited by 5G signals. There are some other more specialized tools such as AntSyn, used for antenna synthesis and optimization, 5G/radar libraries, and more.

One of the challenges that we faced at Cadence when we started to create Virtuoso RF and integrate AXIEM is that the OA database didn't support all the weird (by IC design standards) geometries required for RF design: circles, arcs, any-angle routes, bond-wires, and more. These simply don't occur in traditional IC design, which OA was originally architected for. By the way, many of these turn out to also be required for silicon photonic design. Neither RF signals, nor light, likes to go round sharp corners all that much.

I asked Sherry if it is needed for on-chip analysis, too:

There certainly is the need for AWR technology for on-chip analysis, which is why the AXIEM EM solver was integrated into Virtuoso RF as an immediate joint project even before the discussion of a potential acquisition.

Designing RF and getting it to work the first time is a challenge. In RF, physical design matters. Not just the details of the RF/microwave device, but the interaction between the device, nearby traces and other conducting surfaces. But it can be done. Phil Jobson of Pocket Radar said, AWR Design Environment:

allowed me to quickly model and redesign the 24GHz microwave system and obtain first-pass success.

Integrand

You may have heard that Cadence also recently acquired Integrand Software, which is also in the RF space. More on that in tomorrow's post.

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