Keysight Technologies Joins Altium's Nexar Partner Program - Seite 2

As part of the Nexar partner program, Keysight will be able to connect PathWave ADS to the Altium ecosystem through the Nexar API, aiding collaboration and making advanced simulation more accessible to all hardware engineers and PCB designers.

“Keysight is excited about working with Altium to improve our customers’ workflows,” said Tom Lillig, General Manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight. “Our PathWave software framework allows interoperability across our customers’ entire product development lifecycle, from design through validation and manufacturing. Engineers can use the same measurement software during both their simulation and test phases. This allows our customers’ teams to work more closely together, more easily correlate measurement results, share data more efficiently, and ultimately get to market faster. We’re thrilled to bring the Altium Nexar PCB design community into the PathWave framework for applications like DDR and PCIe. Keysight is already the industry leader in both the simulation and test of high-speed circuits. Together with Altium, we can complete the end-to-end high-speed PCB design workflow.”

Streamlining the Simulation Process with Nexar

Typical design cycles involve extensive iterations. As a PCB design evolves, layout engineers need to frequently communicate design changes to both mechanical engineers, and signal integrity experts, to reach design sign-off. This is a bottleneck, slowing the overall design cycle. To improve the process, signal integrity simulations need to be performed earlier— with schematic-based ‘pre-layout’ simulation, to avoid later rework of the PCB layout.

As Stephen Slater, Product Manager for PathWave ADS, elaborates, “PCB layout engineers want to be as efficient as possible and avoid rework, while at the same-time SI engineers want more frequent access to sanitized layout data. Today signal and power integrity engineers check the electrical performance of the PCB using PathWave ADS to perform electromagnetic extraction, channel simulation and to test for compliance to high-speed digital standards. Yet, when they find an issue to fix, the primary communication method is through phone calls, email and screen captures. This can be improved.”