Virtuosity: Blogging Journey of Virtuoso Place and Route in 2019

What a year we’ve had!

2019 was quite an exciting and busy year for the Virtuoso Placement and Routing team as we steered a course through the waves of new features and enhancements.

We launched the Automated Device-Level Placement and Routing flow, an assistant-driven flow that automates every step, from constraint creation and grid generation to placement, fill insertion, and routing. You might have already experienced how this flow produces a layout in minutes with nothing but a schematic as the input. Modgens too have been enhanced to provide better analog layout automation capabilities. In the routing domain, we saw several new features, such as trunk generation, trunk mesh routing, and tree route. You might have already witnessed a significant reduction in the overall routing time when using these features on a large design. We also made several enhancements in the Multi-Patterning Technology. You can now set flows easily with predefined flows, control the coloring scope with on-demand coloring, and perform violation checks using the options in the Multiple Patterning toolbar.

In support of the various enhancements, our technical gurus and the writers in the Virtuoso placement and routing team collaborated to publish three series of informative blogs during the latter part of the year. For ease of reference, we’ve now collected all 13 blogs – along with Chinese and Japanese translations where available – into this handy summary post. In addition, we also posted a Virtuoso Video Diary blog on Multi-Patterning Technology.

The Reading List

Bookmark this page and read these blogs at your leisure.

Virtuosity: Automated Device Placement and Routing Series

The blogs in this series covered various tasks in the automatic device-level layout flow — from initializing the design and placing objects to routing the design automatically.

Virtuosity: Device-Level Routing for Advanced Nodes Series

This series of four blogs lists all the new enhancements made in the device-level and structured routing space and enfolds the story of how a trunk and a twig became a tree. In this series, 3 out of 4 blogs were translated to Japanese.

Virtuosity: Module Generator Series

In this blog series, we gave a brief overview of our product Virtuoso Module Generator also known as Modgen. You can find out more about the Modgen GUI options, scripts, and other features through these blogs.

Virtuoso Video Diary Blog

The Virtuoso Video Diary: Tune In to the MPT Video Channel blog provides a link to the MPT video channel and helps you learn about the recent features introduced in Virtuoso Multi-Patterning Technology (MPT).

Looking Ahead

We worked hard in 2019 to make our blog content more impactful and appealing for our readers and more accessible for those who do not have English as a first language. The graphics below summarizes some of the innovations introduced in Virtuoso placement and routing blogs over the course of the year.

2020 comes with a new set of goals and challenges! We’ve already started the new year with a bunch of new features. The Automated Device-Level Placement and Routing flow now extends its support to Modgens. We’ve also introduced the Auto Device Array form, a powerful unified interface to generate, edit, and route Modgens. Another key feature we’ve added to the flow is the incremental placer, which you can use to handle Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) and place only the unplaced devices in your design.

That was just a glimpse of what’s new. We promise to keep you informed and up-to-date about the all the new technologies that we are working on. 

Stay tuned to know more about what we have in store for you!

Related Resources

Virtuoso Automated Device Placement and Routing Flow Guide

Virtuoso Multi-Patterning Technology User Guide 

Virtuoso Module Generator User Guide

Virtuoso Space-based Router User Guide 

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

Contact Us

For any questions, general feedback, or even if you want to suggest a future blog topic, write to custom_ic_blogs@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!

Virtuoso Placement and Routing Tech Comms Team