In this section, we talk about Encrypting Designs using RFIP Encoder in ADS, which is an important method to protect intellectual property and sensitive design data. RFIP Encoder provides a secure way to encrypt design files, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access and use these files.

Let’s take the design in Design1_withQ as an example:

The figure shows the internal architecture of our entire design, which contains all the design details. However, if we just want others to use our design for simulation and testing, we can encrypt our design (the other party must have the corresponding PDK library).

Save the existing design first, then select “Tools – Encode Designs”:

Then, we can see all the designs in the library. Select the schematic of Design1_withQ (you can also select multiple designs at the same time), and then click “Add”. We can set it as a bitmap , and we can customize the icon and name, etc. We will use the default settings first. Then, change the library name ( Library Name) to “EncoderTest”, and then the library version number (Library Version) to 1, the library description (Library Description) to “Encoded LPF Design”, and set the destination path (Destination Path). And like the library provided by the supplier mentioned earlier (they also use a similar encryption method), we can choose whether to generate a .zip compressed file. In order to facilitate the addition of design files later, we first choose not to generate a compressed file. Then enter your name, email address, and other information.

When ready, click “Encode”. All opened designs will be closed, and the following prompt window will appear:

In the window, we can see some execution information. We can find the encrypted design in the corresponding location locally.

We can see that the contents of the file are very similar to the library provided by the previous supplier. We import this library in the workspace:

Let’s create another schematic and select our library in the Library Palettes:

As you can see, we have a component with a lock icon. When we put it into the schematic, we can see that it is no different from our previous design. But when we click it, we find that we cannot view the detailed information of the component.

Then we insert the template according to the method in the previous section:

Then execute the simulation, we can see that the results after simulation are consistent with the previous simulation structure.