Keysight Technologies has expanded its collaboration with Ansys to integrate Keysight’s PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS) RFPro environment with the Ansys HFSS electromagnetic simulation. As a result of this collaboration, radio frequency (RF) and microwave engineers can eliminate the time-consuming bottleneck of manually coupling design tools to simplify workflow and improve time-to-market. The initial collaboration between the two companies, originally announced in February 2021, improved the workflow between the companies' products to speed time-to-market for 5G, aerospace and defence, as well as automotive applications.
Tom Lillig, general manager of Keysight PathWave Software Solutions said that Keysight’s PathWave framework helps customers get to market faster from design through production. Developing open interfaces between design and test software products, enables end-to-end workflow solutions across system/circuit design, verification and manufacturing. He also said that they have expanded PathWave beyond Keysight products, to connect Ansys HFSS with PathWave ADS RFPro. This partnership enables their customers to solve large, complex development challenges, even faster.
Keysight’s RFPro simulation solution is an electromagnetic (EM) environment for RF and microwave circuit designers and is seamlessly integrated within Keysight PathWave ADS. RFPro makes performing EM analysis easy, simplifying EM-circuit co-simulation and saving hours to weeks of simulation setup time.
Steve Pytel, vice president of Ansys Product Management said that Ansys is committed to building world-class products in an open ecosystem. Collaborating with Keysight complements this strategy, enabling Keysight and Ansys to provide comprehensive solutions that address their customers’ engineering challenges.
Keysight’s ADS RFPro was introduced in PathWave ADS 2019 and has generated broad adoption within the ADS user community. Keysight is now addressing customers’ larger workflow challenges with PathWave workflow solutions. HFSS is a trusted, widely used, finite element method (FEM) solver and now in addition to Momentum and Keysight FEM, ADS design engineers have access to HFSS as an additional simulation option within ADS RFPro.
Steve Pytel, vice president of Ansys Product Management said that many customers couple Keysight's PathWave ADS and RFPro for RF circuit design with Ansys HFSS to verify and validate their assembled RF modules. The manual process to move design files between tools is time consuming and can create bottlenecks — especially as the die-counts increase for complex RF modules in applications like 5G and 6G. He also said that they are collaborating with Keysight to alleviate this pain point — ultimately creating an efficient workflow that drives fast results for their mutual customers and spurs innovation within the industry.
The PathWave ADS RFPro HFSS link option will be available in Keysight’s ADS 2022 and is expected to ship in the summer of 2021.
