AWR® Corp., a leader in high frequency EDA, announced AWR Connected™ for Cadence® Allegro®, which enables PCB and RF co-design, simplifying the design process for high performance printed circuit board (PCB) design and significantly shortening cycle times. AWR Connected for Cadence Allegro is an interface between Cadence’s Allegro products, including both Allegro PCB and Allegro package/SiP design tools, and AWR’s Microwave Office® design software.

The combined product flow works by extracting user-specified data from Allegro — conductors, nets, components, pins, substrate, material properties — and generating a file that can then be quickly and easily imported into Microwave Office for simulation. The PCB layout is exported directly from Cadence Allegro for layout and schematic creation in Microwave Office, and the imported design is ready for EM extraction flow with, for example, AWR’s ACE™ or AXIEM™.

"Today’s RF and wireless PCBs contain analog, digital, mixed-signal and RF circuitry all on the same board. As a result, designers need to integrate their RF design data with PCB layout technology,” said Hemant Shah, Product Management Director for Cadence’s Allegro PCB and FPGA products. “Our cooperative effort with AWR provides our customers with just such a flow and solution.”

“AWR Connected for Cadence Allegro is the latest in a series of AWR Connected products developed specifically to integrate AWR software with complementary industry-leading design hardware and software,” said Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing at AWR. “With AWR Connected products, our customers are able to leverage Microwave Office software across a broad spectrum of hardware/software co-design.”