What's Good About RF PCB Libraries? 16.6 Has a Few New Enhancements!

5 Aug 2013 • 1 minute read

There have been a few new library level enhancements made to 16.6 Allegro RF PCB Editor—

New libraries
Setup enhancements
DRC removal for netlist re-import
Discrete library translator enhancements

Read on for more details …

New libraries

We’ve provided two new RF components that existed in ADS:

VIA2
SLINO

VIA2 is a special via component in ADS, which is something like Allegro via padstack (but it’s not a padstack structure):

SLINO is a stripline component with a special substrate structure:

Setup enhancements

When you select RF-PCB > Setup, there is a new item named Customize in the drop-down list for the Parameter set in the Options tab. This is used to determine if the GUI will be floating or fixed in the Options tab. There are currently three items:

All
Autoplace
Clearance settings

If you check All, then all RF PCB GUI forms will be floating instead of fixed in the Options tab:

If you check the Autoplace option in the form above and then launch the Autoplace command, you will see that the GUI for Autoplace will be floating:

DRC removal for netlist re-import

In the past, after you transfered a schematic to layout and completed the RF placement using Autoplace, if you re-imported the original netlist without any changes into Allegro PCB Editor, you would see a lot of DRCs (shape2shape or shape2pin) and you would have to run autoplace again to remove those DRCs. Because the shape nets for RF components are missed during the netlist importing, all RF shapes have a dummy net. This situation has been enhanced in 16.6 to remove the DRCs when re-importing the netlist without any changes.

Discrete library translator enhancements

When translating a Allegro discrete library to ADS, some pin numbers may not be correct in the ADS schematic. For example, when we export the following component to ADS:

The result in ADS may be that some pin numbers are not correctly mapped:

This situation was fixed in 16.6.

Please share your experience with these new capabilities.

Jerry “GenPart” Grzenia