What About Bunny?

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

Yeah, what about Bunny? Early in February, I attended DesignCon 2010, and, aside from having a number of really great meetings with customers, partners, and media, I was curious if there would be a return of Bunny. As all of you who attended DesignCon 2009 will remember, Bunny was the talk of the show (for better or worse is a personal judgement call).

No Bunny at DesignCon this year, but following Altium’s lead at taking a risk by trying something new, AWR exhibited for the first time this year as a partner within the Anritsu booth. DesignCon 2010 proved to be a successful venture. We exhibited our AWR Connected™ solutions with Anritsu, and our unique joint solution for signal integrity that combines Anritsu¹s VectorStar test equipment with AWR's Microwave Offic® high-frequency design software. The value of this combination is that Microwave Office adds functionality above and beyond what can be done with the hardware itself – in particular adding to S-parameter measurements the ability to visualize eye diagrams and time domain simulation results- and this is especially useful in signal integrity applications. AWR Connected™ for Anritsu makes the MS4640A the first microwave instrument in the world to physically integrate a full suite of design software within its firmware. You can see AWR’s DesignCon 2010 video interview as well as a demo of this solution on AWR.TV.

Also at this show, for those of you with keen vision, you would have noticed a yet-to- be-released link to Cadence Allegro.This new capability enables Allegro/APD users to export their layout (or portion thereof) into Microwave Office. And last but not least, AWR’s industry expert on EM, Dr. John Dunn, presented a three-hour tutorial entitled The Use of Computer Clusters and Spectral and Domain Decomposition in 3D FEM Analysis. The year prior, John presented a tutorial called Understanding Grounding Concepts in EM Simulators that was a big hit with the audience and has since been turned into an extremely popular white paper and a 6-part EM tutorial on AWR TV. Stay tuned for more on the 3D FEM analysis tutorial!

“What about Bunny” was the take-away line from DesignCon 2009 for me. This year it was certainly all… “What about AWR!”