Success Story: Alcatel-Lucent Reduces Design Time By Eliminating File Translation Issues Between PCB And High-Frequency Design

The Design Challenge
The circuits created by the PHC must conform to the electrical and physical requirements for the systems of which they will be a part. Because these systems tend to evolve as they are developed, a great deal of flexibility is required, which has been hampered for many years because the PHC was forced to maintain two separate component libraries. When beginning an RF or microwave design, the footprint had to be synchronized and verifi ed with both the Mentor Graphics printed circuit board (PCB) software tools and AWR's high-frequency design software.

After the layout was complete, data was transferred via DXF (data exchange format) from AWR's Microwave Office software to Mentor Graphics Expedition. However, there was no way to perform bidirectional data transfer in order to import the microwave schematic or symbols to Mentor's DXDesigner, or to export circuit modifications performed in Expedition back to the Microwave Office platform. The increasing complexity of the team's design coupled with the sheer volume of its workload made this productivity roadblock unacceptable.