How to Minimize Parasitic Effects in RF Circuit Boards
arasitic Effects in RF Circuit Boards
RF circuit board design requires an enterprise-level tool that can handle high frequencies and use the systems-level approach needed for the task. RF circuit board designers need a tool that supports RF-aware circuit simulation and frequency-dependent transmission-line models to ensure embedded parasitic extraction and to identify and resolve harmful parasitic couplings and resonances. The best RF PCB layout tools also support EM/circuit/system co-simulation, and include a hierarchical EM model library to enable faster EM analysis.
Among the most commonly used rf circuit board layout tools is Altium Designer. This premium software can run on a Windows or Linux computer and features an easy-to-use graphical user interface with organized menus, toolbars, and panels to facilitate a smooth design flow. It comes with a robust 3D visualization feature to enable the user to verify component orientation and other physical constraints of the board before it is built. In addition, it provides a set of RF-specific libraries to speed up the design process.
It is also equipped with a powerful 3D electromagnetic field solver that can reduce engineering time by performing full-field, frequency-swept EM analysis in a single pass. This can help to detect parasitic couplings and resonances and reduce the risk of failure during prototyping. It can also perform high-speed analysis, enabling users to get results in real-time and make changes quickly and effectively.
How to Minimize Parasitic Effects in RF Circuit Boards
This PCB layout tool offers a variety of other useful RF-specific features such as parameterized etch element generation, quick placement, and RF-style routing. It can also import netlists from a variety of formats and support through-hole and surface-mount components. Other functions include a 3-D viewer and push-and-shove routing. This is a popular choice for many professional PCB designers and engineers who require advanced layout functionality.
The tool is also equipped with an RF-aware design and characterization environment to ensure accurate modeling of a PCB’s signal transmission paths. It enables engineers to easily identify and correct impedance issues that could lead to poor performance, such as voltage standing-wave ratio (VSWR). Its integrated circuit design environment also supports signal-domain analysis and power integrity modeling with preconfigured or customizable system testbenches for analysis of adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR), bit error rate (BER) and error vector magnitude (EVM).
Cadence software has an innovative front-to-back RF design workflow that combines schematic capture, layout, and simulation to improve productivity and first-pass success. Its RF-aware circuit and EM simulators provide comprehensive modeling and analysis capabilities to address complex wireless communication and radar systems, including circuit and matching network design. Its automatic RF circuit synthesis technology identifies performance trade-offs in matching networks, which can save hours of manual calculations.
Other RF circuit board layout tools include Eagle PCB, a free and open-source EDA tool. It has a number of RF-specific features that can be useful to professionals and hobbyists alike. These include a 3D view of the circuit board, through-hole components with through-hold capability, netlist import, and support for any board shape. Moreover, it allows you to edit RF-style via arrays and place them along user-specified objects such as an RF component, a connection line (cline) or a discrete component.
