Keysight Technologies, Inc. announced that Altium LLC recently licensed Keysight's advanced electromagnetic (EM) simulation technology to develop power analysis solutions for printed circuit board (PCB) designers. Keysight and Altium are partnering to address the needs of hardware engineers who are not power integrity experts.

Reliable power distribution is a pervasive problem facing PCB designers. As IC components trend toward lower supply voltages for increased power efficiency, it becomes difficult to design a PCB power plane within shrinking tolerance limits. Designers typically build several iterations of prototypes or submit their designs to power integrity specialists. Both are sub-optimal approaches that hinder rapid design turnaround. By empowering PCB designers to find and fix problems before first prototype, they can achieve higher productivity, faster time-to-market and greater predictability in the design process.

Power Analyzer is the first offering to result from the strategic partnership between Altium and Keysight, providing interactive analysis of power integrity issues. Altium integrated Keysight's EM simulation technology with its modern graphical user interface to make power analysis fast, accurate and easy to run. PCB designers using Power Analyzer gain insight into their power plane performance through analysis of voltage drop and current density from within their PCB layout environment.

Tom Bastanza, senior sales director at Altium said, "Our broad installed base of PCB designers faces growing power analysis challenges as designs become denser and more complex. Customers want a product that allows them to gain early visibility into power integrity issues and avoid the pain of prototype re-spins late in the design cycle. Power Analyzer saves time by identifying problem areas leveraging Keysight's simulation and analysis expertise. It eliminates the need to hand over designs to a specialist for power distribution network validation because it empowers hardware engineers to see and remedy the problems for themselves right in their trusted Altium PCB layout environment."

Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight said, "This technology integration partnership is about democratizing simulation technology and digitally transforming the workflow for a large hardware engineering audience. It gives designers easy access to proven simulation algorithms that identify critical power distribution network issues early in the design process. Power Analyzer puts Keysight's simulation directly into the hands of PCB designers to enable intelligent tradeoffs as well as faster development cycles."