Cadence and Helic Team for RF Design

Online Staff -- Electronic News, 5/27/2004

U.S. EDA vendor Cadence Design Systems has teamed with Helic S.A. of Athens, Greece to address the demand for integrated EDA platforms, smarter flows and more functionality in RF and multi-GHz applications, the companies said today.

With the agreement Cadence is adding Helic's VeloceRF, a rapid modeling and synthesis tool for on-chip and in-package inductances, to the Cadence Virtuoso platform as an extension.

Cadence also licensed Helic's PolyRadio RF IP to act as a WiFi reference design in its Virtuoso platform, which includes RF silicon blocks such as a low-noise amplifier, an integrated power amplifier and voltage-controlled oscillator, linear direct-conversion mixers and programmable analog baseband circuitry, the companies said. The Helic RF IP has already been fabricated and validated on a series of silicon germanium BiCMOS foundry processes, Helic said.

"Our reference cases within the platform are based on real-world designs, not on designs just made to make the tools look good," Kurt Johnson, group director for Virtuoso flows at Cadence, said in a statement.