Keysight Technologies Inc. announced that Altium LLC recently licensed Keysight's advanced electromagnetic simulation technology to develop power analysis solutions for PCB designers. Keysight and Altium are partnering to address the needs of hardware engineers who are not power integrity experts. Reliable power distribution is a pervasive problem facing PCB designers.

As integrated circuit components trend toward lower supply voltages for increased power efficiency, it becomes difficult to design a PCB power plane within shrinking tolerance limits. Designers typically build several iterations of prototypes or submit their designs to power integrity specialists. Both are sub-optimal approaches that hinder rapid design turnaround.

By empowering PCB designers to find and fix problems before first prototype, they can achieve higher productivity, faster time-to-market, and greater predictability in the design process. Power Analyzer is the first offering to result from the strategic partnership between Altium and Keysight, providing interactive analysis of power integrity issues. Altium integrated Keysight's EM simulation technology with its modern graphical user interface to make power analysis fast, accurate, and easy to run.

PCB designers using Power Analyzer gain insight into their power plane performance through analysis of voltage drop and current density from within their PCB layout environment.