Use cases

Four ways a board
bites back.

High-speed lanes, antennas, connector launches and crosstalk. Each one below is a screen capture of Tidewire's 3D solver, cropped to the field slice that tells the story.

HIGH-SPEED DIGITAL RF AND ANTENNAS CONNECTORS AND LAUNCHES CROSSTALK AND COUPLING
High-speed digital

Lanes that pass the mask

MIPI, USB, HDMI, PCIe and Ethernet pairs live or die on impedance, skew and the connector at the end of the board. Tidewire solves the pair, the launch and the cable together.

  • Differential impedance along the whole path, as a TDR
  • Eye diagrams checked against standard or custom masks
  • Skew and mode conversion between the two lines
  • Touchstone files for your channel simulator
381 mV eye on a MIPI DSI lane at 1.5 Gb/s, board to ribbon, passing the D-PHY mask with 50% to spare.
Screen capture · 3D FDTD, 1.5 Gb/s MIPI DSI lane.
Screen capture · 3D FDTD, Gaussian broadband pulse.
RF and antennas

See where the energy goes

Patch antennas, PCB trace antennas and Yagi arrays radiate or fail to because of geometry you can't see on a layout. Watch the pulse leave the feed and find out why.

  • Return loss (S11) and match across the band
  • Far-field patterns from the same run
  • Near fields around the antenna and its ground
  • Board and enclosure effects on tuning
Broadband answers from one time-domain run: a Gaussian pulse covers the whole band at once.
Connectors and launches

Find the bump before the fab does

Every connector launch is an impedance step waiting to happen. Tidewire models the real connector from the maker's STEP file, attached to the pads it actually lands on.

  • Twelve coax families, with edge, through-hole and top launches
  • 22 standard cables and FFC ribbons
  • TDR that shows exactly where the impedance dips
  • Launch geometry you can tweak and re-run
An SMA launch with half a metre of RG-316: 5.95 million cells, solved in 21 seconds on a desktop GPU.
Screen capture · SMA launch, half a metre of RG-316.
Screen capture · neighbour-lane coupling through a gap.
Crosstalk and coupling

Keep the neighbours quiet

Pairs that look far enough apart on the layout can still talk to each other through gaps, slots and shared returns. Measure the coupling before it costs you a respin.

  • Near-end and far-end crosstalk between any lanes
  • Multiport studies, one excitation per port
  • Coupling through ground-plane gaps and slots
  • Overlays to compare layout fixes run against run
Neighbour-lane crosstalk on the MIPI adapter: 0.42% near end, 0.79% far end.

Who it's for

Consultants

Sign off client boards with numbers you can put in the report.

PRO EDITION →

Small hardware teams

Share seats across the team and check every high-speed layout before it ships.

TEAM EDITION →

Makers and radio amateurs

Get your USB, HDMI or antenna right first time, for hobby projects.

MAKER EDITION →

Educators

Show students the fields instead of describing them.

EDUCATION EDITION →

Bring your
own board.