Virtuosity: Do Rulers Rule Your Layout Designs?

We live in a world where the idea of usability is to make products easy to use, make things easily accessible, and visually appealing. It's our constant endeavor to improve the usability of our products. Watch out this space for our posts every month on usability enhancements in Virtuoso® Layout Suite.

Rulers are probably one of the most frequently used features of Virtuoso Layout Suite and it has been around for years. It's not wrong to say that rulers rule layout designs. You use the Create Measurement command to create rulers in your layout designs.

Usability Enhancements in the Create Measurement Command

You are aware that rulers let you measure the distance between edges or points. In case you want to create multiple rulers at one time, it indeed becomes a very cumbersome process as you would have to create one ruler at a time. Well, that's a thing of the past! You can now use Auto segment mode while creating rulers. This lets you create multiple rulers in just two clicks. The edges are snapped and highlighted so that you can easily select the desired edges and rulers are automatically created between the edges. This surely brings in a huge productivity gain as it reduces the amount of time you need to spend while creating measurements.

In the figure below, you can view how you can use Auto segment mode to measure the width of wires and spacing between them by clicking at the first edge and then the last edge.

View the animation below to see how a measurement is created in Auto segment mode.

You can also view the animation below to see how you can use Auto segment mode of the ruler to measure overlaps in shapes. 

You can also use this feature to dynamically display rulers according to the position of the pointer. You can view this in the animation below.

If you haven't yet started to use Auto segment mode feature, start using it, and let it rule your layout designs!

Related Resources

User Guide 

Virtuoso Layout Suite L User Guide (Create Measurement Form)

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.

Happy reading, and stay safe!

Mike Lin and Komal Johar

About Virtuosity

Virtuosity has been our most viewed and admired blog series for a long time. The series has brought to the fore some less well-known yet very useful software and documentation improvements and has also shed light on some exciting new offerings in Virtuoso. This series broadcasts the voices of different bloggers and experts, who 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. To receive notifications about the new blogs in this series, click Subscribe and submit your email ID in the Subscriptions box.