The following interview took place in March 1999, before Agilent Technologies became a separate company from Hewlett-Packard.
Communications System Designer and Advanced Design System are now products of Agilent EEsof EDA.
As an EDA tool provider, HP EEsof is in the business of improving our customer's productivity. To better understand the problems that design engineers encounter in a typical development process and gain
insight into their design tool needs, HP EEsof regularly conducts customer visits and interviews.
One of HP EEsof's product engineers visited with Jeroen Kuenen, a systems engineer at Ericsson in Enschede, the Netherlands. Mr. Kuenen develops wireless communications products for Ericsson Business Mobile Networks, where he encounters many of the challenges facing today's communications designers. Following is an interview with Mr. Kuenen.
What types of products do you develop? for what applications?
"We develop digital European Cordless Telephone (DECT) products. the principal applications for the DECT standard are:
1) Multi-cell cordless communications systems (cordless PBX) for business enterprises and 2) radio access systems for subscribers to public telecom services termed Wireless Local Loop (WLL). This service is referred to as Cordless Terminal Mobility (CTM). Another application is single-cell home cordless phones.
How do you use Communication Systems Designer in your projects?
"Communications systems Designer is used for the complete system performance evaluation of the analog chip as well as its parts. We evaluate blocking behavior, impact of delay spread between two signal paths due to filtering and limited speed of the electronics, as well as verifying the achieved selectivity with the filters distributed for the radio. In addition, we look at noise performance of strongly nonlinear circuitry like the limiter chain, which consists of several limiter stages. Each stage is modeled with a nonlinear gain block."
How effective do you find Communication Systems Designer?
"I like how easy it is to generate a true GMSK signal and investigate the noise performance during
a transient analysis of nonlinear circuitry. I also like the ability to perform steady-state noise analysis of nonlinear circuitry. the ease of designing a complete radio with the library, which is filled with a lot of blocks that are directly useable, is also very helpful. The ability to create several plots next to each other is a good feature, too. And I especially like the fact that there are very few bugs to deal with."
Have you tried any other simulation tools? How do you like those?
"Yes. I have tried several other simulators, all more or less aimed at circuit simulation. Many other tools have good core capabilities, but are flawed by software bugs or simulation limitations. Often simulation accuracy is lacking for certain types of circuits or they cannot perform what I need, such as noise analysis during transient or FFT."
Do you work with DSP designers? What is their role in a project?
"Yes, their role is to find the proper algorithms for the digital system. Together, we evaluate the system performance of this combination.
How will the new Advanced Design System with its integrated DSP and RF design environment help you?
"Greatly. first, the integration of both DSP and analog will yield some benefits, but especially the possibility of simulating a system modeled at two levels: high abstract level for some blocks and transistor level for other blocks will be a great feature."
As Mr. Kuenen observes, co-simulation capability can significantly improve the mixed-signal design process for systems, RF, and DSP designers. The new Agilent Advanced Design system answers many requests from design engineers throughout the industry by providing RF/analog/DSP co-simulation. The cumbersome file-based transfer links needed for different RF and DSP design tools are no longer necessary. Agilent EEsof's new methodology lets designers develop complex RF and DSP components in a more efficient and practical way.
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