Virtuoso Video Diary: Creating and Previewing Stimuli

Over the next few weeks, the Virtuosity and Virtuoso Video Diary blogs will focus on the just-released features in Virtuoso®ADE Assembler, Virtuoso®ADE Explorer, and Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis. Because we have a lot of interesting new enhancements and functionality to tell you about, we will be posting twice a week—Tuesday and Thursday. Today's blog is the first of this mini blog series for ADE. This blog will highlight the new form that we introduced to help you create stimuli for your design. Do stay tuned in for more interesting ADE blog topics.

If you've ever tried to add stimuli to your design using the Stimuli form, you'll agree it needed a revamp. Most people tend to use a vsource or isource component or a file to set up stimuli. But wouldn't it be nice if you could create a library of stimuli to share between designs, and to preview your stimuli waveforms without having to simulate the entire circuit.  Well in Virtuoso®ADE Assembler and Virtuoso®ADE Explorer from IC6.1.8 ISR3/ICADVM18.1 ISR3 we have introduced a new form, the Stimuli Assignment, that not only allows you to define and assign stimuli and share them between designs, but preview them too.

Our new form allows you to create current and voltage stimuli of several types, edit the stimuli, preview the stimuli waveforms individually or on the pins in Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis, assign stimuli to pins, global nets and bus bits, and even import and export stimuli and assignments between designs. 

Generating stimuli is simpler too. Just fill in all the values required to define the stimuli, and, if you’d like, choose to generate the waveform too. The status indicator assigned to each stimuli should tell you if the stimuli was generated correctly, and if it wasn’t, you can open the log file to figure out what could have gone wrong.

If you thought that was all, the new form offers more help. It comes with handy filters to help you find pins and stimuli and supports cross-selection to the schematic to help you locate the pins there. It also provides an active status reflecting the number of pins and global nets that are assigned stimuli. With the new form, assigning stimuli is just 3-steps away! Select the pin (or pins), Select the stimuli, and Click Assign.

The image below shows the preview of a few different types of voltage stimuli. 

To see in detail how this new Stimuli Assignment form works, watch the videos listed under Related Resources below.

While creating and managing stimuli using this form, you can click  to open the Task Assistant, a quick-help interface that assists you with the commands you can use.

Related Resources

• Videos
  • Introducing the ADE Stimuli Form
  • ADE Stimuli Authoring
  • Assigning Stimuli to Pins or Global Nets
• User Guide
  • Virtuoso ADE Explorer User Guide

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!

Arja