1.0.0-beta.6 Public Beta

Sixth public beta.

Simulations Are Much Faster

• S-parameter sweeps run 2.5-4x faster — a Touchstone-backed part no longer re-fits its
  interpolation at every point, the matrix is rebuilt only where it actually changes, and the
  frequency grid is solved several points at a time.
• Harmonic balance runs 2-5x faster, and multi-tone gains the most — a six-tone sweep is 5x faster. Nonlinear device equations are evaluated across the whole time grid at once, which is 10-38x faster on its own.
• Loadpull benefits twice over, since every point on its grid is an HB solve, and a 640-point
  sweep now takes a third of the working memory it did.

Harmonic Balance Converges Where It Used To Give Up

The solver no longer takes a full Newton step that makes things worse — it backs off and tries a
smaller one. A drive-level sweep that returned six non-converged points now returns none, at a third
of the time per point. Drive Stepping now does something: when a cold solve is hard, the drive is
walked up in steps to the level you asked for.

Technology Editor

• A 4-layer FR-4 starter joins the 2-layer one in New Workspace — signal / ground / signal /
  ground on 62 mil, with each signal layer paired to its own plane.
• File > Save is no longer greyed out on an edited technology file. Cmd+S always worked; only the
  menu was stale.
• A via row no longer offers a Thickness field. Nothing read it anyway— the barrel's length is its span
  — and every shipped file carried zero there, which read as something you had forgotten to fill in.
• Ground-reference messages now name the planes they found and say what the cost is, instead of
  claiming no plane is marked when one is.

Project Tree

• Double-clicking a Known File opens it. A bookmarked schematic, symbol or layout used to do
  nothing at all.
• Copy to Workspace as Cell... on a bookmarked schematic, symbol or layout builds a cell in your
  workspace around a copy of it, leaving the original reference alone.
• A file inside the workspace is now listed only once, where it lives. Import Data and a file drop onto the
  tree were both producing a second copy under Known Files.
• Reveal on a broken reference now walks up to the nearest folder that still exists and says so.

Data Display

• Max Gain is plotted correctly now. MAG/MSG is a power gain, so its dB is 10log10 — it was being
  computed and labelled as a 20log10 quantity, reading 2x too large in dB. The trace card now offers
  a real linear / dB10 choice rather than a unit annotation, and marker readouts and the axis label
  agree with it.
• Derived traces survive a re-run. Max Gain and the stability circles used to vanish from a
  display whenever the S-parameter analysis was re-run, and were then dropped when the file was
  reopened. Ordinary S(i,j) traces were never affected, which is why it looked so arbitrary.
• Run (Cmd+R) works while the Analyses panel has focus. Clicking into the panel used to grey out
  the menu item and the shortcut while the panel's own Run button stayed live.

Schematic Editor Improvements - Wires Keep Their Shape When You Move a Part

Dragging a component used to re-route every attached wire as a bare L between its two ends. That is a
re-wire, not a re-draw: anything tapping the middle of that wire was silently disconnected, and
the circuit still simulated. It also moved runs off their rows, turned horizontal wires vertical, and
occasionally laid a new leg exactly on top of an unrelated wire.

Now a moved endpoint deforms only its own end of the wire. Bends, rows and columns survive, and so
does every tap. When there is no slack, an elbow appears at the moved end — the vertical jog you would
expect under a part nudged off its row. A tap that genuinely leaves its wire grows a short stub at a
right angle instead of dragging the whole run after it, and that stub undoes with the move.

MIM Capacitors in the EM Solver

Thin-film capacitors are now expressible and simulable in the planar EM engine.

• A via drawn as a region — a plate connection, a backside slot, a bar — is now recognised as a
  via. Previously only the point via shape was, and drawn artwork on a via layer was silently
  ignored with a note saying the layer was unbound.
• A conductor entry can now say which surface of its band its analysis sheet sits on. On a MIM
  stack that is the difference between modelling a 0.2 um plate gap and a 3.2 um one.
• A capacitor dielectric is patterned with its plate, not smeared across the whole design. That
  removes the reason there were ever two GaAs technologies: mmic-GaAs_2LM_100um now carries the MIM
  module, and a run that uses only the interconnect metals is unaffected by it. Existing workspaces
  hold their own copy of the technology and are untouched.
• A port on upper metal now de-embeds. Three separate refusals used to fence off exactly the
  case a MIM run produces — a feed arriving above the substrate — and they are gone.
• The EM setup warns when the mesh is too coarse for the plate spacing, and tells you the cell
  count that would fix it rather than pointing at a setting that cannot.
• Importing a process stack now names conductors that no via reaches and drawing layers the
  stackup never binds, so an omitted optional module is visible instead of silent.