Signal design toolkit

Agilent has announced what it claims is the first integrated verification toolkit for signal integrity design. Intended for use with the company's advanced design system EDA software platform, the toolkit identifies and analyses sources of performance-degrading jitter in multi-gigabit communication link designs.

It helps designers find and remove the causes of jitter before hardware prototyping begins.

The kit contains technology used in the company's real-time sampling oscilloscopes for accurate jitter characterisation. ADS is said to be the first and only EDA tool to provide diagnostic jitter analysis tools integrated into a high-speed channel design flow.

This latest release of ADS also provides enhancements to its serialiser/deserialiser, or SERDES, modelling capability.

The new library of SERDES components available with ADS includes 8B10B encoders/decoders; 64B66B encoders and decoders with and without scrambling; non-adaptive and adaptive feed forward and decision feedback equalisers, using a wide variety of tap optimisation algorithms; and a new digital signal source capable of producing a de-emphasis waveform with random and periodic jitter modulation and transition wave shaping.

It has a set of front-to-back simulation and layout tools as well as instrument links for RF and microwave IC design in a single, integrated design flow. It can simulate a serial link consisting of models for frequency-domain interconnect, time-domain driver/receiver, physical layout, SERDES, compiled and scripted MATLAB-based functions, System-C, Verilog-A, HDL and C++.