circuitRF Reference Guide
The complete technical reference. Plain and direct — look things up here.
The Reference Guide is every chapter below. They are in one reading order, and every page carries Previous and Next links at its foot, so the whole guide can be read straight through as well as dipped into.
Core concepts
- The Workspace The workspace window: documents, tool panels, docking, and the folder behind it all.
- Settings The Settings dialog, tab by tab: launch, permissions, colour theme and wirebond defaults.
- Units DBU, display units, the snap grid, and how to type a value with an SI prefix.
- Expressions Variables, cell parameters, functions and conditionals — one expression language.
- Grid & Connectivity The schematic grid, wires, and how connectivity is decided.
- Pins, Ports & Terms Pin, Port and Term: three different things with three different jobs.
- File Formats Every circuitRF document type and what is inside it.
- History Everything circuitRF has kept of a workspace: the states it kept for you, the versions you kept on purpose, and how to go back to any of them.
Design
- The Schematic Editor Drawing a circuit: the palette, placing and wiring, and setting up the analysis that runs it.
- Components Every component in the standard library: symbol, purpose and parameters.
- Importing a SPICE Model Importing a SPICE .model card or .subckt: what is carried, what is not, and why.
- System Components The ideal blocks a system diagram is drawn out of, and where passive intermod comes from.
- Dynamic Symbols (SDD, ZPort, SnP) Components whose symbol changes with their parameters.
- Symbol Editor Drawing and editing a symbol.
- The SDD (Symbolically-Defined Device) The Symbolically-Defined Device: writing a nonlinear model as equations.
- The Nonlinear Capacitor & the C–V Editor C(V) as a Taylor series, and the C–V Editor that fits one.
- Compiled Verilog-A Models Running a compact model you supply, from Verilog-A source or a compiled artefact.
- The Match Component Direct synthesis of a bandpass matching network that absorbs both terminations.
Simulate
- Simulations DC, S-parameters, harmonic balance, parametric sweeps, loadpull and pursuit.
- Measurements Post-processing a run into named quantities.
- The Netlist (.cnl) Format The .cnl elaborated-netlist format.
- The Data Display Plots, tables, trace cards and markers.
- Derived Metrics Stability, passivity, group delay and the passive impedance readouts — with the equations.
- The WSProbe The WSProbe: nodal transfer functions for stability and in-situ design — with an appendix on stability itself.
- Plot Types Rectangular, Smith, Polar and Table — and which data each will accept.
- Results & Data Export Getting results out into Python, MATLAB or a Touchstone file.
- The Command Line Running every analysis headless: the verbs, their options and their exit codes.
Layout & EM
- The Layout Editor The layout view: technology, drawing, snapping, and the schematic it belongs to.
- Footprints SMT land patterns: case sizes, density levels, and how a part gets its artwork.
- Layout versus schematic Layout versus schematic: does the artwork implement the drawing, and what the report names.
- PCells Parameterised cells — placing one, driving it, and its parameter handles.
- PDK Integration Importing a kit and simulating the parts it supplies.
- PDK Authoring Authoring a kit: the OpenPDK layout, Python PCells, models and artwork.
- The Stackup The layers your board is made of - and which conductor is ground.
- The MoM Engine The planar method-of-moments solver: what it does, what it will not do, and how.
- EM Setup The EM Setup panel, control by control, and where the results land.
- Antennas Patch antennas: the pattern, the numbers that go with it, and the limits that bound both.
Tools
- Smith Chart Narrowband matching by hand: one curve per component, a handle on every joint, and the load moving as you drag.
- harmonicaRF Interactive harmonic load-pull on one device, at the speed of a mouse drag.
- wBond Bondwire arrays: geometry, the 3D kernel, and S-parameters out.
- railRF Power integrity on the board you drew: DC drop, Z(f) against a target, and which decaps earn their place.
Where to start
Read Units and Grid & Connectivity first. Between them they cover the two conventions that are circuitRF's own rather than the industry's — how a coordinate is stored versus displayed, and what actually decides that two things are connected. Almost every early surprise is one of those two.
Four of these are tools in their own right rather than components with a dialog, and the fifth is a whole class of parts.
The Match Component synthesises a bandpass matching network that absorbs both terminations — closed-form, no optimiser, and broadband. The Smith Chart is its narrowband opposite: it synthesises nothing, and instead draws one curve per component so you can drag the network into place by hand. harmonicaRF runs harmonic load-pull on one device while you drag a marker. wBond models bondwire arrays as geometry rather than as a number you looked up. And System Components covers the ideal blocks a system block diagram is drawn out of — circulator, coupler, hybrid, balun, switch, amplifier, attenuator, filter, duplexer and mixer — including where passive intermodulation comes from and what "ideal" costs you.