Spotlight on: The Spiral Inductor Assistant for Sonnet
Catherine Alton, Sonnet Product Marketing Team
At Sonnet we’re always looking for ways to make your high frequency design job easier. In that spirit, we would like to share with you the latest add on tool for Sonnet: The Spiral Inductor Assistant from Dr. Mühlhaus Consulting & Software.
The Spiral Inductor Assistant is a spiral inductor synthesis tool for quickly generating Sonnet simulation models. The spiral inductor shapes are based on a palette of popular single ended and differential inductors. The tool is currently available for Sonnet Professional as a time limited evaluation copy which expires Dec. 31, 2009. Any Sonnet customer with a Sonnet Professional Suite installation can download and use the Spiral Inductor Assistant.
The Spiral Inductor Assistant provides quick and reliable on-the-fly design and analysis of planar inductors. It uses a pre-defined technology template file containing process stack up definitions and material properties, which is easily created during your first spiral synthesis within a given process. From there, you only need to input a few parameters to immediately create a fully functional EM simulation model of the inductor, ready for efficient simulation in Sonnet’s EM analysis engine.
Why should you download this tool? When it comes to inductor verification, Sonnet leads the EM software industry in efficiency and accuracy. However, unless you are already importing your inductor designs, getting the right inductor layout can be a challenge. The spiral inductor assistant completes the design flow, and the time required to create an inductor model is reduced from minutes to seconds since the tool automatically generates simulation models based on a few input parameters and predefined ports, reference planes and mesh settings.
Two versions of The Spiral Inductor Assistant for Sonnet are currently available: The Lite version, which is limited to single ended inductors and is currently only available for Windows; and the Professional version which supports differential (symmetric) inductors and is available for Windows and Linux platforms.
Inductors may be defined as either round or N-sided. Both single-ended and differential inductors can be synthesized in the Professional version, and differential inductors may include center taps. With the lite version of Spiral Inductor Assistant, you can choose between circular, or N-sided single-ended (unbalanced) spiral designs.
Once a spiral inductor model has been created, simulated, and extraction models are developed, the inductor layouts can be imported into major high frequency EDA design frameworks through Sonnet’s integrated framework interfaces, or through popular model exchange formats like GDSII, DXF or Gerber. Extracted electrical models can also be transitioned to simulation environments through Touchstone S, Y or Z-parameter files or Sonnet’s Spice extraction models. Some of Sonnet’s EDA interfaces will import both into your EDA design environment automatically—at the same time.
Any existing Sonnet project can be used as a process or stackup template, and any existing geometries in the file will be ignored. The length unit in the Spiral Inductor Assistant is automatically read from the template file.
Save yourself design time right now by downloading the trial version of the Spiral Inductor Assistant. Visit http://www.muehlhaus.com/spiral_inductor_assistant.htm to download your evaluation copy.
