Intercept Technology Inc., a leader in PCB/Hybrid/RF electrical engineering applications, announced that National Instruments has selected the Pantheon and Mozaix RF design flow on high performance RF designs. Intercept welcomes National Instruments, a leader in test and embedded measurements, to its community of users as a major technology collaborator. Intercept worked closely with National Instruments on the migration of in-process RF designs and the training of RF design and layout personnel in the Intercept user flow.
“National Instruments selected Intercept tools for our latest generation of RF instruments,” said Jin Bains, R&D manager at the Santa Rosa site of National Instruments. “Designing such high performance RF instruments requires very intricate PC board design. The Pantheon tool is well suited to these challenges and gives us the right amount of control over difficult geometries, which is vital to our designs.”
The first product to be manufactured from Pantheon RF designs is the National Instruments PXIe-5663 6.6 GHz vector signal analyzer, a new compact RF signal analyzer capable of high throughput RF measurements with 50 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, a highly stable timebase, and flexible software tools that can handle measurement applications ranging from component characterization to production test of wireless devices.
Intercept’s RF-specific design flow is available in the standard Pantheon and Mozaix applications, which offer flexibility to RF users on and above any other software package available in the market. To boost the built-in flexibility of Intercept’s applications, there are many special licensing options for more advanced RF-specific features. Among these features, Intercept offers bi-directional interfaces to HFSS, ADS and Microwave Office, as well as the advanced reverse-engineering option, Palindrome, which automatically creates a schematic from a layout (parts and symbols are placed from library information, or can be automatically generated on the fly). Any RF design environment can utilize any number of these options together with core Pantheon and Mozaix functionality to boost the RF design flow to new levels of sophistication and faster turn-around development time.
