VIRTUOSO SCHEMATIC EDITOR

By Carsten Deinstrop and Robert Schweiger Opposed to digital design in full custom design starts with schematic entry. Especially for complex ICs this could be a quite tedious and lengthy task. Things like quick navigation within complex hierachical designs, efcient property editing, powerful search engine you name it could dramatically impact your productivity. Even you reduce the total number of mouse clicks for a specic task it could sum up to a signicant amount of time over the course of the day. In the following article we would like to highlight some of the new key features of the Virtuoso Schematic Editor (VSE). Window Workspace Concept In order to use your screen in the most efcient way a new concept of window workspaces was introduced in Virtuoso IC 6.1. It allows a specic arrangement of the design canvas area (schematic or layout) and surrounding assistant windows that can be saved and recalled. In order to perform specic tasks in the most efcient way, you can easily switch between different task-oriented window arrangements. For an intuitive workow some features like Forward, Backward, Up, Bookmarks and Tabs are inspired from modern web browsers. Several cellviews can be opened at the same time within Cellview Tabs that are contained within the overall design canvas frame. By clicking on a tab header you can easily switch between multiple tabs to a particular cellview. Within a tab either a schematic, layout or symbol can be displayed.

Figure 1-1: Virtuoso Schematic Editor XL including docked assistant panes. Assistant Panes Assistant panes are providing a range of powerful new features e.g. improving accessibility to commonly used functions, displaying additional information without requiring menu selections. All Assistant panes can be either docked to the design canvas (Figure 1-1) or oating as a separate window.

The assistants available in the Virtuoso Schematic Editor XL are: Navigator Assistant Property Editor Assistant Search Assistant World View Assistant Constraint Manager Assistant Circuit Prospector Assistant Search Assistant The powerful Search assistant pane provides an extensive range of advanced search functionality similar to a web search engines like Google. Search offers a number of features including dynamic context search categories, fast keyword directed searching with immediate feedback, and an intuitive UI that makes design data searching both simple and productive.

Figure 2-1: The Search Toolbar Often a designer is looking for instances, nodes or nets to make some edits, to debug the design or to simply change properties. With the new powerful search assistant you can easily search for bookmarks, SKILL functions, constraints, label text, etc. There are also several string matching types like prex, substring, exactly and sufx available. To rene the scope of your search just limit it to a specic search category (Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2: Search categories

Example: Just enter a string e.g. a and do a search for All. Since this is a very generic search it will generate a huge amount of data. The result will be a structured list of occurences of this search string (Figure 1-3) in any of the categories.

Figure 2-3: Search result window Navigate & Bookmark Let assume you are working on a big hierarchical design and forgot to make some changes in a cell which you just left 5 minutes ago. Hopefully you remember where this cell is located in your design not to loose too much time to safely navigate through 20 hierarchies. In IC 6.1 this is a no brainer. The Navigator Assistant pane displays the design hierarchy of the current open cellview. From the Navigator you can expand the hierarchy to quickly identify and select any instances, nets, and the pins that are contained in each instance across a schematic hierarchy. If you would like to do later on some edits in the same cell, just bookmark it using the Bookmark Toolbar and directly access this cell conveniently at any time. If you select an instance in the Navigator it will automatically scroll in the corresponding schematic window to display the highlighted instance. Selections made in the Navigator will also be reected in the The Property Editor Assistant and the Constraint Manager Assistant, Schematic Entry and vice versa.

Figure 3-1: Instance NM25 is highlighted in the Navigator and in Virtuoso Layout XL Property Assistant The Property Editor provides a exible framework for dening a collection of objects and their associated properties. Object Properties can be viewed and edited as required. The new property editor assistant provides functionality that goes way beyond our standard property editor. Some of the key features provided by the Property Editor include the ability to: 1. View by object type and property categories 2. Compare values across multiple selected objects 3. Directly edit individual property values on single and multiple objects

Figure 4-1 The Property Editor assistant context-menu

Select View by Property to display all properties associated with the selected objects, grouped by property name. In entering a property value in the (various) eld it will be automatically assigned to all listed instances.

Figure 4-2 Red font property names indicate differences in property values Summary By providing a unied design environment and advanced user interface capabilities, the Virtuoso Custom Design Platform improves efciency by dramatically shortening the learning curve for adoption of new tools and enhancing ease-of-use during IC development. The new Window Workspace Concept allows a comprehensive display of design data. Docked assistant panes like the Search, Navigator, Property Editor and World View help the designer to enter and edit schematics in a much more efcient way. Within a common cockpit, engineers can launch any design tool without changing the environment. As IC companies expand the environment with additional tools, the same usage paradigm helps engineers spend less time learning how to work with the new tool and more time focused on applying the capability to their design problems. Cadence offers several update training courses where you can learn more about the latest features in the new Virtuoso custom design platform IC 6.1: http://www.cadence-europe.com/education/.

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