Virtuosity: Can I Speed up My Plots?

13 Oct 2017 • 3 minute read

If your Virtuoso ® ADE Assembler, Virtuoso ® ADE Explorer or Virtuoso ® Analog Design Environment XL setup contains multiple sweeps or corner points, or maybe the transient simulations are time consuming, then plotting waveforms using Plot All may consume significant time and memory.

Here, Quick Plot will help you out. Quick Plot will plot outputs in Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis, faster and with much less memory usage. This is because it uses a reduced set of data points.

Quick Plot is only available for complete transient simulations.

Look at the example performance stats below!

Does this mean that the plot is not accurate?

No, the quick plot data is real data, just with less points. When zoomed out, Quick Plot data will look very similar to a normal plot.

Any quick plot signal that is sent to the calculator will automatically use the real full point data to retain accuracy.

In this example the pink plot is the quick plot waveform, notice the legend shows a cross hatched box. The blue plot is the full waveform. You can see that the quick plot has less points than the full plot but is very close to the full plot, and at full zoom you can’t see the difference.

Here are the plots zoomed out to the normal view - you can't tell that there is a difference.

Can I access the real plot if I use Quick Plot?

Yes you can, any plot that has been plotted via quick plot can be expanded to show the full data. You just need to right click on the trace and choose Quick Plot Expand To and choose where to expand the plot to.

Remember you don’t need to do this if you send the plot to the calculator as it will automatically use the real data here.

Look at the example below, when the Quick Plot is expanded into the new subwindow, you can see many more data points.

OK, I want to try Quick Plot

By default, the Save Quick Plot data check box is selected in the ADE Assembler, Explorer or ADE XL Plotting/Printing Options form.

After simulation just right click on the results and choose Quick Plot All.

Or in ADE Assembler or ADE XL, simply choose the Quick Plot option from the drop-down menu on the Results toolbar.

Managing the quick plot data.

If you want to reduce your simulation data footprint, then you can right click on the history name in the Data View assistant and choose Delete Simulation Data->All Except Netlists and Quick Plot Data.

This means that you can still use the Quick Plots but they cannot be expanded or sent to the calculator, since you have deleted the full simulation data.

Where else can I take advantage of Quick Plot?

Since Quick Plot makes plotting the waveforms almost instantaneous then if we use it to create a datasheet we will see performance improvement here too.

By default, the Use Quickplot data option is checked in the Create Datasheet form

Related Resources

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com.

About Virtuosity

Virtuosity has been our most viewed and admired blog series for a long time that has brought to fore some lesser known, yet very useful software and documentation improvements, and also shed light on some exciting new offerings in Virtuoso. We are now expanding the scope of this series by broadcasting the voice of different bloggers and experts, who would continue to preserve the legacy of Virtuosity, and try to give new dimensions to it by covering topics across the length and breadth of Virtuoso, and a lot more…Click Subscribe to visit the Subscription box at the top of the page in which you can submit your email address to receive notifications about our latest Virtuosity posts. Happy Reading!

Aditya Mainkar