Start Your Engines: Clone your AMS Designer Testcases and Rerun them Anywhere

Cadence® Spectre® AMS Designer is a high-performance mixed-signal simulation system. The ability to use multiple engines and drive from a variety of platforms enables you to "rev up" your mixed-signal design verification and take the checkered flag in the race to the market. The Start Your Engines! blog series will provide you with tips and insights to help you tune up your simulation performance and accelerate down the road to productivity.

Bonjour!

In this post, I will cover how the Design Capture and Packaging (DCP) utility lets you isolate, capture, and package the source files easily from your Spectre AMS Designer testbench and immediately rerun it in the same or a different environment.

Prior to the Design Capture utility, handling the database for AMS Designer testcases and rerunning them could require a lot of time, support, and setup modification. A complex AMS Designer SoC testcase can include more than fifteen thousand source files, and to describe that testcase, more than sixteen languages can be used. In such cases, the engineer in charge of the final verification could be interested in efficiently isolating, capturing, and archiving the source files of the testcase. This could also involve experimenting on the duplicated testcase database and some code or setup modifications to rerun it in a different environment or a user account.

Today, DCP allows you to do all of that in just one step.

I will now show you how to use Design Capture through command-line options or the ADE Explorer and Spectre AMS Designer GUI.

Capturing a Testcase Database Using Command-Line Options

The following figure summarizes the flow.

Launch the following command:

% dcp -capture ./runMe

Here, runMe is your simulation Linux shell run script that compiles all the source files, elaborates a simulation snapshot, and runs it.

If you have no run script, use the following xrun command:

% dcp -capture "xrun -f xrunArgs"

Note that your xrunArgs file should have the -clean command to read all the testcase source files.

After the simulation is complete, and you exit the simulator, Design Capture automatically creates an archive file in the format YYYMMDDHHMMSS.dcp that contains all the testcase source files.

Capturing the Database for Virtuoso Testcases

Step 1: In the Netlist and Run Options form in Virtuoso ADE Explorer, select the following check boxes:

• • Clean snapshot and pak files
    
  • Batch (normal)
  • Enable design capture
    
    

Step 2: Click OK.

Step 3: From the ADE Explorer simulation menu, select Netlist and Run.
Design Capture operates automatically when the simulation is running and quietly monitors all the files used.
Immediately, after the simulation is completed, an archive file is created in the format YYYMMDDHHMMSS.dcp, in the simulation or netlist folder with all the testcase source files.

The captured database is stored in a database archive file in the format YYYMMDDHHMMSS.dcp when the simulator finishes and exits. With these new archive files, you can rerun this testcase in a different environment or user account.

Rerunning the Captured Testcase

The archive file created for the captured testcase can be reused without any change to rerun the simulation in a different location.

To do this:

Use the following command:
% dcp –rerun YYYMMDDHHMMSS.dcp
Design Capture then automatically finds the original Linux command used for running the simulation during the capture process and manages the new file paths.

Advanced DCP capabilities exist for both capture and rerun operations. To discover them, log in to your support.cadence.com user account and look for the Getting Started with Design Capture user guide and the associated RAKs. You can find the links to these in the Related Resources Section.

Key Benefits

• Ease of use.
• The convenience of capturing and re-launching the testcase.
• Silent detection of testcase files when you run the simulation.
• Productivity: Automatic backup creation for your testcase files.
• Automation: DCP captures the testcase, imports the user setup, and creates the final archive file dcp.
• Flexibility: The testcase source code can use any of the sixteen languages supported by AMS Designer simulator.
• Versatility: The testcase could be simple or a very complex SoC Design under test.
• Efficiency: No exhaustive file content or user setup change is required to rerun the captured test case.

Conclusion

Design Capture takes away the pain of capturing and rerunning setups!

We have been receiving excellent feedback from the designers and CAD engineers that have worked with Design Capture.

I would like to quote a few here:

User 1: “Now, Design Capture allows me to isolate and share testcase databases easily with colleagues from different sites. They are able to rerun the cloned testcase database immediately.”

User 2: “Design Capture provides me more than 30X to 50X user work gain for the complex SoC testcase database cloning and after for immediate rerun tasks.”

User 3: “I love Design Capture: my Verification Team uses it today for maintaining our internal testcases regression suite.”

User 4: “Design Capture, both capture and rerun operations, worked as a charm.”

Hope you are now excited to try out Design Capture yourself! If you need more details, contact your Cadence Support team.

- Andre Baguenier

Related Resources

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

About Start Your Engines

The Start Your Engines series would bring to you blog posts from several analog/mixed-signal subject matter experts on a variety of topics, such as introduction to the new features in AMS Designer, tips for enhanced working with existing features, and much more. To receive notifications about new blogs in this series, click Subscribe and submit your email ID in the Subscriptions box.