Virtuosity: Working with Tests in Virtuoso ADE Assembler Made Smarter

Don’t we love the new features that make our favorite products even more cool? 

At times, small, but smart UX enhancements give us a better experience. Be it a simpler way to change the phone settings, a new banking menu to add multiple beneficiaries in one go, or a location sensor added to a cab-booking or food-ordering app, all of us welcome such simple design innovations that make our tasks easier and quicker.

At Cadence, we understand that user experience is an important factor for the success of a product, so we continually strive to make it better. Here, I introduce you to two new features in Virtuoso® ADE Assembler that will improve your interactions with tests.

Customizing the Transition from ADE Assembler to ADE Explorer

If you frequently switch between Virtuoso® ADE Assembler and Virtuoso® ADE Explorer to edit the setup or to run simulations, you may like to use this feature that allows you to apply the standard, double-click command, which opens an item in GUI applications, to the tests in ADE Assembler. This means, you can now double-click a test name in the Data View assistant to open it for editing in ADE Explorer.

By default, you double-click a test to edit its name. If you would like to personalize the double-click command for test editing, set the following environment variable:

envSetVal("maestro.gui" "openExplorerOnTestDoubleClicked" 'boolean t)

Tip: If you change the result of the double-click command, how will you edit the test name? You can still do that in ADE Explorer. Double-click the test name in the Setup assistant and change it.

Customizing the Confirmation Requirement for Setup Changes

Have you ever experienced a situation when you deleted some tests or corners, but later realized that you actually needed those and there is no way to get them back. That’s when you would have wished to get a chance to review the deletion task to be sure of your choices. We understand that tests and corners are important pieces of your setup and that losing a test or a corner can cause you a lot of rework. So, we have introduced a check to seek your confirmation before the deletion is carried out

The best part is that you are also given a flexibility to retain or remove these confirmation checks. If you are confident about your actions and want to always say Yes for a deletion, you can suppress the display of the confirmation prompt by clicking the Do not show this dialog again check box on the prompt the first time it is displayed. The messages will not be displayed again in the current Virtuoso session.

Alternatively, you can use the axlSuppressPersistedQuestionDialog SKILL function and provide the ID of the message you want to suppress, as shown below.

axlSuppressPersistedQuestionDialog(<message-ID>)

Adding this function in the .cdsinit file hides the specified message from all Virtuoso sessions. If required, you can again allow the display of the messages using axlShowPersistedQuestionDialog.

Note: This feature is also available in ADE Explorer. 

Well then, try out these UX enhancements yourself and let us know if they make your test-handling much easier.


Related Resources

• Virtuoso ADE Assembler User Guide
  • openExplorerOnTestDoubleClicked
• Virtuoso ADE XL SKILL Reference
  • axlSuppressPersistedQuestionDialog

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 the 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 will 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!

Namrata Malhotra