Ansoft announced the availability of Nexxim v3 and Ansoft Designer v3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 and Sun Solaris 8 and 9 operating systems. Nexxim is the company's circuit simulation software for high-performance IC design and signal-integrity analysis. Ansoft Designer provides an integrated schematic and design management front-end for complex analog, RF and mixed-signal applications. In addition to Linux support, Nexxim v3 adds phase and time-variant noise, autonomous source harmonic balance and integration with Cadence ADE/Spectre RF. Adding accurate phase and time-varying noise analyses to Nexxim is critical to the full characterization of communication ICs.

The ability to include both driven and autonomous sources with a single harmonic-balance simulation dramatically expands the accuracy and detail with which complex transceiver circuits can be analyzed. Concurrently, Nexxim allows engineers developing large and complex analog/RF designs to simulate accurate transistor-level time- and frequency-domain performance directly from within the Cadence ADE design framework, leveraging existing design-flow infrastructure, foundry models and circuit-related intellectual property. Ansoft Designer v3 offers expanded Solver on Demand capability. Engineers can capture high-frequency parasitic behavior directly in their circuit simulation and apply that knowledge toward design optimization and verification. Moreover, extending the Solver on Demand technology to include HFSS, Ansoft's 3D full-wave electromagnetic-field simulation software, allows to perform parametric design optimization with GHz-accurate, full-wave extraction.