You are probably working from home. So is pretty much everyone at Cadence, too. This might make getting support a little trickier than normal. No application engineer is going to be dropping by your office on a regular basis...not that you will be there anyway.

There are two major places to access support, one that's been around for years, and one that is new.

The Support Portal

24/7, the Cadence support portal is available. You can get to it from all over the Cadence website or you can just go straight to support.cadence.com. There are manuals and videos covering the whole Cadence portfolio. It's the start of April as I write this, and I can see that almost 2,500 new items were uploaded to the portal just in March.

In a weird self-referential kind of way, it turns out that the most popular page on the whole site right now is Best practices for using the Cadence Support website. If you've not used the portal before, then this is actually a good place to start. With so much content on the site, it makes sense to set some preferences so you get told about aspects of the Cadence tools and IP that interest you. If you mostly do custom layout and run circuit simulation, you probably are not that interested when a new switch is added to the Genus Logic Synthesis tool.

On that best practices page, you can find out how to:

• Set your search preferences so that you get to see the most relevant search results
• Set your notification preferences, so you automatically get notified when new content matching your areas of interest is added
• Find out about a specific product
• View other cases from users at your company (known as "case groups")

Generally speaking, when you go to the support portal, the first thing you are likely to want to do is to search for something. You can type what you are interested into the big search box at the top of the page (like in the image above). If you check the box underneath, you can use wildcards. A '*' will match anything and a '?' will match any single character. So, for example, you could search for "virtuoso 6.1.*" for information about all the 6.1 releases.

Cadence Support App

Your phone is just not cool enough if it doesn't have the Cadence Support App installed. Everyone should have this icon on their home screen.

To get it, you can use these links (iPhone App Store Google Play Store) or you can use your App Store / Play Store application and search for "cadence support". Obviously you need to do this on your phone. If you are reading this on your laptop, then I suggest you copy the URL of this page, and then email it to yourself. Then read the email on your phone and click on the link. That should bring you back here fairly painlessly.

Once installed, you should see an app icon for Cadence support like the one at the top of this post. The first time you use it, you need to enter your email and password. Click on the "remember me" box to keep yourself logged in, except in the unlikely event that your phone is a shared device. Once you log in, or when you return, you will see the home screen:

This is very similar to the home screen on the support portal. You will typically search for something of interest. If you pull up some documentation, or anything else that is a pdf document behind the scenes, you probably want to rotate your phone to look at it in landscape mode:

Learn More

Learning more is what the support portal and the new app are all about. You know where to go. Or watch the video:

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