Amphenol® RF engineers spend countless hours working with our customers to ensure our connectors are as effectively integrated as possible to their products. With competitive pressure and new product development cycles shrinking ever more, efficient collaboration with customers and partners for successful product integration has never been more important. A critical challenge in high performance RF connector design is to understand the impact of the connector’s launch to the device. Being able to validate our connector design on the customer’s product as early and as confidently as possible in the design stage is critical. To help address this need, Amphenol® RF is now making available, for download, encrypted ANSYS HFSS 3D models.
Amphenol RF provides full ANSYS HFSS 3D component models of their SMA High Frequency Launch Connectors to help their customers save time and evaluate performance in a virtual environment.
We offer ANSYS HFSS 3D models of printed circuit board connectors for download at no cost. These self-contained 3D models allow designers and engineers to simulate the performance of a PCB connector on their custom PCB prior to placing an order. By reducing the need for optimization through iterative changes on multiple physical prototypes, the design cycle time is drastically improved.
With countless PCB materials and stackups available, simulating and optimizing the launch was previously performed exclusively by Amphenol RF Engineers. In many cases a non-disclosure agreement with NRE charges was required. However, with the availability of HFSS 3D component models, the need for these restrictions on certain products have now been eliminated. Amphenol RF connectors can now be conveniently inserted into any design and simulated under specific constraints within the system PCB. This process mimics physical printed circuit board launch geometry, allowing designers and engineers to optimize the launch of a PCB to minimize return loss. The PCB launch geometries (anti-pads, trace widths and gaps) are integral to minimizing reflections at the launch, especially as frequencies increase.
In 2015, ANSYS delivered a game-changing collaboration capability in HFSS called 3D components. For decades, engineers could pull component models from a vendor website, and insert them into circuit (0D) designs. Likewise, S-parameters are commonly distributed by vendors, which allow engineers the ability to incorporate high frequency behavior into their designs. But as we all know, 0D models won’t capture some of the real-world effects, especially at high frequencies. The only way to achieve the full fidelity is to model the 3D aspects of the components with a full-wave electromagnetic solver. ANSYS showed how customers can create and deliver their own 3D electromagnetic components which allow end users to simulate a vendor’s connectors in the rigorous ANSYS HFSS 3D simulation environment while protecting the Amphenol RF intellectual property, both geometry and material properties, of the connector from the downstream user. This provides our customer the knowledge that they can design in our connectors with the confidence of a full fidelity 3D model providing a no-compromise understanding of the performance.
We look forward to collaborating with our customers through the sharing of encrypted ANSYS HFSS 3D components. Please visit our site to download our HFSS 3D component models and user guide for our SMA High Frequency Launch Connectors.
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