Portable Electronics: World Class Designs

Chapter 6. RF Design Tools

Chris Bowick’s RF Circuit Design has long been an engineering classic. When it was written 25 years ago, EDA tools were in their infancy. Verilog was just invented and VHDL was two years off. You had SPICE for analog simulation but for RF it was Smith charts, a calculator and prototypes. Cheryl Ajluni wrote the current chapter, which is a good introduction to the current design languages and tools available to assist RF designers.Not that there are a lot. While there’s no shortage of EDA tools for digital designs—and an increasing number for analog/mixed-signal (AMS) ones—RF circuits continue to be a lot harder to model than, say, a memory controller or an audio amplifier. But being able to automate something as thorny ...