Virtuosity:"What's In a Name?"

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

Shakespeare knew long before us, that even names can be deceptive! The meaning of a word can be influenced by the context it is used in or the perception of a reader - both of which can be contradictory. I will try to support it with an example. The word type can be used to mean typing, as in, "He can type over 100 words per minute." Or, I can say "That guy is not really her type." You see? Here is another example.

Why are we talking about this?

Shifting our focus to Virtuoso® Analog Design Environment or ADE. Different users might interpret field names in the Simulator Options and Analysis Options forms in Virtuoso® ADE Explorer and Virtuoso® ADE Assembler differently, based on their past experience with other software, their own language and its usage. In such a scenario, we believe that a little advice from the experts can get you to the right point effortlessly and more quickly. If our tool can inform you about the meaning and purpose of a supported field, we hope the communication will empower you to use the tool more confidently.

In an endeavor to provide the most required information at the right time and place, we have recently enhanced the Simulator Options and Analysis Options forms to show tooltips for the field names. While designing a form, it is very important for us to know how to strategically place certain pieces of information out of user access, and provide it just-in-time, when required. One of the ways of disclosing such information is using tooltips.  So, when you hover the cursor over a field name in a form, a small message box pops up to prompt about the purpose or usage of the field.

Note: This feature is available with MMSIM16.1 ISR13, SPECTRE 17.1 ISR3 or higher versions.

The information in tooltips, which is readily available saves you from having to visit the documentation of the forms and support site. It gives you a first-hand support within the tool itself. We hope these on-demand tucked away tooltips will be beneficial to you. Our endeavor will be to propagate this enhancement to other forms as well.

Related Resource

Virtuoso ADE Explorer User Guide

• Environment Variables for Spectre Simulator Options Form

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.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 to 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!

Vani Verma