AWR announced it has acquired Simulation Technology and Applied Research, Inc.,(STAAR), of Mequon, WI, a developer of 3D parallelized FEM tools for
EM simulation of components and subsystems operating at RF and microwave frequencies. STAAR is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of AWR Corporation, retaining its operations and facilities in Wisconsin, and under the continued guidance of STAAR founder Dr. John DeFord.
AWR chose STAAR after spending much of 2008 evaluating 3D EM technologies and firms in response to customer demand for a seamlessly-integrated 3D FEM tool within the AWR Design EnvironmentT. AWR concluded the acquisition of STAAR in December 2008, at the end of another record-breaking quarter for the company. For the year, sales grew in excess of 22% over 2007, driven by strong demand for the company's new AXIEM 3D planar EM simulator.
STAAR, a profitable company that was launched in 1997, has developed proprietary parallelized 3D FEM EM simulation and analysis capability, which is embodied in its AnalystT software. Analyst software is the result of more than a decade of development at STAAR in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense and U. S. Department of Energy, and has been employed to analyze extremely-complex RF and microwave structures at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Naval Research Laboratory.
Analysis of EM fields in complex structures, such as complete Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs), densely-populated RF circuit boards, and multifunction modules, frequently requires large amounts of memory and processing power that can overburden even the most capable of today's "high-end" workstations. Many of these problems can be solved, but with limited accuracy for want of greater system resources. Analyst software addresses this deficiency by employing scalable decomposition algorithms to optimize cluster computing resources, resulting in dramatically reduced computation times, improved accuracy, and a greater return on investment in computer hardware. By supporting both shared- and distributed-memory systems, the Analyst 3D FEM EM tool is easily configured to work with common computing architectures.
AWR, www.awrcorp.com.
