With the complexity of RF and microwave circuits continuing to grow, speed of simulation must also improve to keep an interactive design environment that emulates the test bench. Unfortunately, as the software itself grows in complexity, performance typically suffers, leading to sluggish behavior. Object-oriented techniques were used to improve the simulation and optimization speed by a factor ranging up to ten or more. Based on diakoptic techniques, a tree structure of caching stores and reuses results without recalculation. In addition, node elimination during the initial parsing of the schematic reduces the problem size.
Larger circuits speed up even more dramatically.
With the design placed in a box with a cover, generalized S-parameters are calculated for arbitrary patterns of planar metal. For the first time, multi-layer circuits with embedded lumped components can be verified without cumbersome data transfer. A typical application of this co-simulation is microwave circuits containing transistors, lumped capacitors, and distributed components such as Lange couplers and spiral inductors. No longer do you have waste time with cumbersome processes to split the design into multiple parts, analyze them separately, then combine them manually. After synthesis and schematic-level design, the circuit is laid out.