Keysight EDA Strengthens Design and Simulation Support for Tower Semiconductor RF Process Technologies

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Keysight Technologies, Inc. expanded the simulation capabilities in its Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software suite to include electro-thermal simulation for the Tower Semiconductor SiGe Power Amplifier (PA) process. Together with process design kits (PDKs) for Tower radio frequency (RF) technologies for circuit and physical designs, the new electro-thermal simulation enables integrated circuit (IC) designers to achieve first pass success.

Keysight Advanced Design System (ADS), RFPro, and RFIC Design (GoldenGate) are industry leading platforms for RF and microwave circuit design that help designers address their most difficult challenges with advanced solutions for radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC), electromagnetic (EM), and electro-thermal simulation. Platform interoperability allows IC designers to access Keysight simulation technologies independent of which schematic or layout environment they use to generate the design.

Tower offers silicon-based analog foundry technologies – silicon germanium (SiGe) for both high-speed and high-power and RF silicon-on-insulator (SOI) – optimized to assist chip suppliers in delivering differentiated RF front-end solutions for increasingly complex devices. Designers employ Tower’s latest PDKs in developing and simulating their RFICs for various applications with Keysight EDA tools.

Dr. Samir Chaudhry, Senior Director of Design Enablement at Tower Semiconductor, said: “Tower has been successfully collaborating with Keysight to solve the most complex RF problems for our customers. Keysight supports our RF PDKs for design and simulation in ADS with accurate electromagnetic analysis in RFPro. Enablement of Keysight’s differentiated electro-thermal solution in ADS for Tower’s SiGe PA processes is a welcome move that is already helping RF SiGe customers perform accurate thermal analyses of their designs.”

Nilesh Kamdar, Senior Director and RF/Microwave Portfolio Manager at Keysight, said: “Keysight and Tower have been partnering for more than a decade to enable our mutual customer design flows with advanced RF solutions, helping them to achieve faster time-to-market. This year, our partnership achieved another milestone by providing electro-thermal simulation capability for Tower’s RF SiGe processes as part of ADS. Using this new capability, customers can ensure that their ICs perform within acceptable operating temperatures prior to manufacturing.”