Virtuosity: Usability Enhancements in the Chop Command of Virtuoso Layout Suite

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.

As technology is advancing, routing in layout has become all the more important and as layout designers you would be spending more time editing wires in your designs.

Usability Enhancements in the Chop Command

The Chop command in Virtuoso Layout Suite has been enhanced to improve your productivity during interactive wire editing. You can now enable line mode in the Chop command and chop multiple wires in two simple steps. This implies that you can cut and chop multiple wires together by drawing a line. You can also chop a wire in a single click, if you are in wire mode of this command. Not only this, you can also ensure DRC-correct spacing between two ends of the wire by using appropriate spacing values. The spacing values can be minimum spacing, user-specified, or no spacing.

In the figure below, you can view line mode of the Chop command. In line mode, you can draw an orthogonal or diagonal line to chop wires or shapes. 

In the figure below, you can view wire mode of the Chop command. In wire mode, you can chop the selected wire with a single click. In this mode, you can only chop one wire at a time. 

You can use the Chop command not only to chop wires but also to chop shapes, mosaics, and vias. If you haven't yet started to utilize these features during interactive wire editing, do use them to enhance your productivity.

Related Resources

User Guide

Virtuoso Layout Suite L User Guide (Chop Form)

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

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Happy reading, and stay safe!

Mike Lin and Komal Johar

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