Virtuosity: Sweeping Multiple DSPF Views in ADE

22 Sep 2017 • 3 minute read

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a view for your DSPF files and sweep them in an ADE session without having to add them as simulation files? Well now you can!

You can create a DSPF view just like any other view, schematic, layout, extracted - and this can be easily included in any ADE simulation. You can also combine this with the config sweep feature to enable you to sweep several DSPF views at once. Just make note that the top-level test bench must be a config. Let's see how to do this...

Let's consider a top-level test bench in which the DiffOpAmp_POWER block contains a schematic and three DSPF views.

From the Library Manager or File menu, create a new view of type DSPF. Here I've changed the default name to dspf_1 to allow us to repeat this for the other two DSPF views. This will open the Text Editor with a sample header for a DSPF file.

Copy the contents of your DSPF file into the Text Editor.

When the view is open in the Text Editor, press the Extract button to create the OA database for the DSPF view.

If the symbol view does not exist, closing the Text Editor will generate a symbol and you will be prompted to specify the pin order.

Repeat this step for the all the DSPF files, giving each one a new name.

Note - If your DSPF files are too large to copy & paste then you can create the DSPF views as above, but copy each DSPF file into the Library/Cell/<DSPF_View> directory with the name design.dspf. Then open the view in the Text Editor and press the Extract button.

Since the view contains a DSPF view, dspf is automatically added to the View List of the config.

To sweep the schematic and DSPF views, add a config sweep to the Global Variables in ADE XL or ADE Assembler. Right-click the Global Variables header in the Data View Assistant and choose Add Config Sweep. This allows you to choose different views to sweep in one simulation.

In the form that pops up, add the views you'd like to sweep.

Once the views are defined you will see them added in the Data View Assistant like this

Then when you run simulation the following views will be swept: dspf_1, dspf_2, dspf_3 and schematic.

The netlist for each point containing a DSPF view will show the include statement.

The results can be plotted in ViVA XL and you can see the variation between the different views.

So now you can see how easy it is to create DSPF views and sweep them in one ADE session.

Related Resources

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Arja Hunkin