Things You Didn't Know About Virtuoso: The View From Above

A few years ago I bought a wonderful book called "Earth From Above".  An amazing French photographer has put together a collection of truly unique aerial photographs of all kinds of unusual natural and man-made landscapes.  It's fascinating how different things look from high altitude--sometimes you can hardly recognize what you're looking at.  You wonder what that same scene would look like if you were down at ground level.  Well, maybe that's not the case when you're looking at penguin poop from space, but you know what I mean.

 Okay, you guessed it, as usual, now I'm going to tie this subject into Virtuoso.  You see, one of the new assistants available in IC6.1 is the World View Assistant.  This handy little widget is activated by--you guessed it--clicking your RMB at the top of your schematic or layout window and selecting "World View".  The assistant pops up in the corner of your window with what the manual refers to as a "panoramic view" of your complete schematic or layout. 

The yellow rectangle, or "view box", superimposed on the view represents the current design area displayed in the main canvas.  You can resize this rectangle using the drag handles on its edges. This will change the zoom level in the main canvas to display the area under the view box.  You can drag the view box around to different areas of the design and the main canvas will pan right to that area.  Or just click in the World View at the location you want to see and the main canvas go there.  And since layouts tend to have just a bit more detail than schematics, the World View Assistant in layout has a menu available on the middle mouse button which allows you to zoom in and out of the World View itself to more easily guide the viewing area.

It's that simple.  No zooming in and hitting the arrow keys a zillion times to pan across to where you were going.  No "bindkey f", then zoom in over and over again.  Just move the little yellow rectangle around and you'll know just where you are.

Bonus Tip: I know we did a whole article on RMB a while back, but did you know that there are some cool things tied to the MMB (middle mouse button) as well?  The one I found particularly useful has to do with toggling the direction of pins while you're placing them.  Like many people, when I'm drawing schematics, I often find myself placing a whole pile of pins all at once.  Some are input, some are output, some are in/out.  It's kind of annoying to have to keep popping back to the form to change the direction. 

What I didn't know was that clicking Shift-MMB while in the "Create Pin" function will toggle through the possible pin types.  Also, just clicking MMB allows you to rotate the pin before placing it (MMB will also do rotation during the "Create Instance" function--very handy!). 

I did run into some trouble with this when I was using VNC and I had previously reprogrammed my middle mouse button in Windows, but these functions can be easily bound to a different key or mouse button. 

That's all for now.  Keep watching this space for more handy features in Virtuoso IC 6.1.

Stacy Whiteman