Mar 07, 2003 "Engineers who design high-speed boards and packages face exceptional challenges", said Dr Zoltan Cendes, Ansoft's Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.
"As these devices get smaller and faster, having an accurate and efficient design methodology is essential for producing reliable products.
Designers use SIwave to fabricate highly complex devices with confidence by optimizing the power delivery and signal integrity of their designs long before the devices are built".
Using a hybrid, finite-element technique, SIwave allows design engineers to characterise simultaneous switching noise, power and ground bounce, resonances, reflections and coupling between traces, and power/ground planes.
Engineers also use the software to simulate high-speed devices with their own driver/receiver models using SIwave's Spice output to obtain accurate system-level simulations.
SIwave 1.1 analyses complex PCBs and IC packages consisting of multiple, arbitrarily shaped power and ground layers and any number of vias, signal traces and lumped components.
SIwave enables designers to model the following types of effects: voltage potential variation across complete power and ground structures with or without decoupling capacitors; power and ground bounce; simultaneous switching noise; impedance discontinuities, such as those due to changes in signal layers or split supply planes; noise coupling between signal lines and supply planes; propagation delay, rise and fall times, reflections and ringing; and frequency-domain phenomena, such as resonant modes and S parameters.
Circuit models providing all of these effects can be output for use in HSpice from Synopsys, PSpice from Cadence or Ansoft's Maxwell Spice.
