AWR®, a leader in high-frequency electronic design automation (EDA), announced that its Microwave Office high-frequency design suite fully exploits a breakthrough in filter design recently released from its partner Nuhertz Technologies®, whose filter synthesis and analysis software, Nuhertz Filter, can be seamlessly integrated within Microwave Office software. This breakthrough, called "delay equalization with off-axis quadruplet and real zeros," reduces from hours to seconds the computation time required to obtain flat group delay response in quadruplet zeros delay equalized lumped element filters.

The integration of Nuhertz Technologies' software is part of AWR's long-standing policy of allowing customers to integrate tools from select third parties within the AWR Design Environment™ to ensure they have the most complete solution for every stage of the design process.

Obtaining flat group delay response to ensure that all frequencies arrive at the same time within a filter's passband is one of the most critical aspects of good filter design and is essential in order to obtain distortion-free performance. Controlling group delay efficiently has been a major challenge for industry and academia for decades and many advancements and algorithms have been developed to more efficiently control group delay in band-pass filters by cross-coupling resonators.

However, low-pass and high-pass filters require massive, time-consuming computer optimizations to synthesize the required component values when efficient quadruplet zeros are employed. Nuhertz Technologies has developed a direct-synthesis strategy for determining the element values that control low-pass or high-pass quadruplet zeros controlled group delay that dramatically reduces computation time while eliminating unnecessary circuit components that result from traditional equalization techniques. Nuhertz Filter, and the stand-alone version Filter Solutions, is currently the only filter synthesis software to provide this capability, and Microwave Office software is the only high-frequency design environment in which it can be directly integrated. Nuhertz Filter software functions seamlessly within the Microwave Office design suite so it is simple for engineers to learn and use.