Two-way Link with ANSYS HFSS

Customers who have both ANSYS® HFSS™ and Optenni Lab™ licenses can easily optimize matching circuits in Optenni Lab based on the electromagnetic simulation results from HFSS using a simple macro command.

To use the link in HFSS, simulate your design and then lauch the HFSS menu command HFSS/Toolkits/UserLib/Optenni Lab. The optimized matching circuits can be returned to the circuit schematic of ANSYS Electronics Desktop by right clicking a circuit and selecting "Transfer circuit to ANSYS Electronics Desktop".

Video presentation of the link:

Link to Microwave Office

Customers who have both NI AWR Design Environment/Microwave Office™ and Optenni Lab™ licenses can easily optimize matching circuits in Optenni Lab and transfer the matching circuits to Microwave Office for further processing in an easy, fast and transparent way. In brief, the procedure is as follows:

• In Optenni Lab, optimize matching circuits based on measured or simulated impedance data
• Right click the optimized matching circuit and select "Transfer circuit to Microwave Office"

The matching circuit is constructed in Microwave Office as a subcircuit, a two-port simulation and related plots are set up and the simulation is run automatically. Now it is easy to use the matching circuit as a submodel of the complete design in Microwave Office.

A video presentation of the link made in collaboration with AWR and Optenni:

See also the following material:

• An article about LTE base station antenna design written by Pulse, NI (formerly AWR Corporation) and Optenni in EE Times Europe

Optenni Lab — Multiport matching

Optenni Lab Professional Edition supports simultaneous multiport matching, which has two operation modes:

• Antenna mode: the efficiency of multiple antennas is optimized simultaneously.
• General multiport mode: the suitable transmission S-parameters (e.g. S21) of the system are optimized. This mode is used  for RF front ends, duplexers, filters, amplifiers, near field communication, wireless charging etc.

The simultaneous multiport matching is much more complex problem than the single port matching, especially if there is high coupling between the ports of the unmatched system. The challenge emerges mainly from two issues: first, the problem dimension is high because the ports cannot be treated separately; second, the number of candidate topologies increases exponentially with the number of ports. Optenni Lab employs parallelized processing and efficient pre-selection of most promising topologies to significantly reduce to solution time.

The electromagnetic isolation tool provides the worst-case coupling (or best case for general multiport!) between any two ports of the system.

The antenna mode is applied also for antenna array performance optimization, including beamforming synthesis. The antenna array optimization mode requires a separate Antenna Array module.

Optenni Lab — Tolerance analysis

The properties of all manufactured inductors and capacitors always differ somewhat from the nominal performance. Optenni Lab provides a one-click tolerance analysis to analyze the effect of component tolerances to the performance. The component libraries contain the available tolerance variants, so that the expected performance variation due to tigher or looser variants can easily be compared.

A unique feature in Optenni Lab is the automatic execution of the tolerance analysis for all topology candidates (possibly hundreds of them) and re-sorting the design candidate list according to the tolerance sensitivity.