Virtuosity: bindStrict or Not in Virtuoso in the Times of Chandrayaan 2

As I sat to write this blog, Chandrayaan 2 was entering its countdown for launch. Apollo 11 has just completed its 50^th year of landing on the moon. Cadence is just back from its first ever participation at the Paris International Air Show! 

Maybe it's all coincidence that advances in Space and Aviation sector seem to be in news at this time. But, is it coincidence too that Virtuoso is geared up to support such advancements not just with its equally glamorous and latest advancements in Photonics and Virtuoso® RF Solutions, but also with its seemingly simple features. After all, even a simple glitch or a mismatch can cause a space mission to be stalled at the last minute, or leave the mission members bewildered!

1201 and 1202 might sound like ordinary numbers to a layperson, but anyone who has been interested in the Apollo 11's space odyssey would know how these two ordinary sounding numbers had caused panic aboard the spaceship as well as at the NASA headquarters because no one seemed to recognize these numbers that flashed in Apollo 11, just a few minutes before moon landing. For Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldirin, these unfamiliar, unexpected, flashing warning numbers could have even meant calling-off the landing, had the code not been deciphered in time by one of the engineers who was responsible for tabling them all. The engineer responded in the nick of time to confirm that the messages were indeed harmless!

To ensure that a mismatch is reported in time in Virtuoso® Layout Suite XL, when a layout is based on a schematic that has reduced its mfactor, sfactor, or lxCombination values since the layout was created, you can choose to set the bindStrict environment variable to t to leave the layout instances unbound. This will cause the Check Against Source command to report the mismatch and the Update Components And Nets command to delete the extra instances that now appear in the layout.

Sounds good?

Am sure it does, but it comes with a price. Folded devices won't bind when binding strictly because instances can't bind one-on-one any more. When folding devices is a priority, you might want to bind liberally.

Related Topics

• bindStrict
• Check Against Source
• Update Components And Nets

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- Rishu Misri Jaggi