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The glass microwave integrated circuit (GMIC) process, provided by M/A-COM, Tyco Electronics UK Ltd., has been adapted to Microwave Office (MWO) with the Process Development Kit (PDK) from Applied Wave Research (AWR). GMIC elements have been written in C++ and dynamically linked together with suitable simulation models in MWO. Elements such as spiral inductors, thin-film capacitors, Lange couplers and thin-film resistors have been included in the component library. Custom models have been created with the Model Wizard tool from AWR. Model Wizard is used to generate C++ code of models that can be compiled as a .dll file. The adapted component library to MWO has been used in the design of a balanced X-band low noise amplifier. The amplifier is described briefly in this article. If a custom process is adapted to MWO, the development time when designing microwave circuits in the specific process will be reduced. Another important advantage with the PDK is that design errors will almost be eliminated.
Applied Wave Research (AWR) offers customization tools for particular processes to the Microwave Office (MWO) design environment. The tools needed to adapt a custom process to MWO are a text editor, Model Wizard, the Source Development Kit (SDK) and a MS Visual C-H- compiler. The MWO plug-in Model Wizard is used to create the source code for custom models. Models can also be included in the Process Development Kit (PDK) as sets of Sparameter files. It is also possible to use existing MWO models. The AWR SDK is needed by the C-H- compiler to turn the source code for the models and layout cells into .dll files. A layout cell is implemented by built-in functions in the SDK. Various functions for different geometric shapes exist in the SDK. It is also possible to implement design rules in the source code. Layout cells and models are dynamically linked together by an .xml file in the PDK. The PDK also contains a modified MWO shortcut, an initialization (.ini) file and a layer process definition (.lpf) file. If an MWO-228 license is available, a design rule check (DRC) file can be included in the PDK. The .ini file specifies additional information, such as file paths to model and layout libraries, that needs to be added...