Agilent Technologies has introduced a 1 million-bit-per-minute signal-integrity channel simulator for multigigabit chip-to-chip data-link design. The channel simulator allows you to perform an interactive eye-diagram measurement from channel simulations within the ADS (Advanced Design System) signal-integrity design-and-analysis environment. “With a throughput that’s a thousand times faster than Spice, it is now practical to make changes to the channel or the transmit-and-receive equalization and see eye-measurement results instantaneously,” says Colin Warwick, signal-integrity-product manager with Agilent’s EEsof EDA division. “The channel simulator … allows our customers to build the model from regular ADS circuit- and physical-level components,” he says. “They can access tuning, optimization, and batch mode—all from an intuitive user interface.”

The most common applications for the ADS channel simulator are design and verification of the chip-to-chip multigigabit-per-second serial links that are present in almost all currently available consumer and enterprise digital products—from laptop computers to data-center servers to telecommunication-switching centers to Internet routers. The simulator helps signal-integrity engineers take into account physical phenomena, such as impedance mismatch, reflections, electromagnetic coupling, crosstalk, and microwave-frequency attenuation due to the skin effect and dielectric-loss tangent.

The ADS channel simulator allows signal-integrity engineers to perform what-if design-space exploration. To aid this workflow, the product uses impulse-response analysis to automatically extract a fast, linear FIR (finite-impulse-response) model from any combination of ADS circuit- and physical-level components. This approach results in simulation throughput of more than 1 million bits per minute. Fast eye measurement lets signal-integrity engineers interactively produce the resulting eye measurements—and optimize transmitter and receiver equalization—in serial links such as PCI Express (peripheral-component-interconnect express), USB (universal serial bus) 3.0, and 10-GbE (gigabit Ethernet).

Agilent’s channel simulator will be available as part of the ADS 2009 release in both the legacy E8885 convolution simulator and its successor, the new W2302 transient-convolution element. The base price is $26,000.