News and New Products

Signal-integrity product adds features

By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, 8/7/2003

As the EDA industry adopts emerging high-speed, asynchronous, serial-bus standards, such as PCI Express, HyperTransport, RapidIO, InfiniBand, and XAUI (10-Gbps attachment-unit interface), signal-integrity is becoming both more critical and complex to analyze. Engineers must worry about protocol-specific design problems as well as classic signal-integrity problems, such as overshoot, undershoot, ringing, and propagation delay.

To address these problems, Mentor has introduced Version 7.0 of its HyperLynx product. The tool now can isolate and analyze and display high-speed effects on both individual waveforms and in eye diagrams. In addition, the tool now simplifies the work to set up multigigabit Hspice simulations, frequency-dependent via and transmission-line analysis, and multibit stimulus and jitter. A new stackup editor allows designers to view and edit design data in spreadsheet and graphical formats. The new version also has an enhanced visual IBIS editor. Both the Terminator Wizard and the Quick Terminator feature differential terminations.

HyperLynx is compatible with each of Mentor’s pc-board design flows, including Board-Station; Expedition; and PADS; and pc-board-layout tools from Cadence, Altium, and Zuken. HyperLynx 7.0 comes in two versions. HyperLynx EXT includes all of the mentioned features except for multigigabit signals, Hspice, and eye-diagram support. It is available with node-locked license starting at $17,500 and is also available with a floating license. HyperLynx GHz offers all of the features, and its floating-license price if $47,500. Current HyperLynx customers with maintenance contracts will get a free copy of HyperLynx EXT 7.0.

Mentor Graphics Corp, 1-503-685-8000, www.mentor.com.