Virtuosity: Maestro Plotting Templates

Waveforms, plots, graphs, measurements, markers... are all a part and parcel of any circuit designer’s everyday life. We have come a long way from the days of Wavescan. Now the much superior tool for graphs and plots, Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis, also known as the ADE waveform window, has been repackaged with stronger features in the latest IC6.1.8 and ICADVM18.1 release. 

For a regular user of Virtuoso® ADE Explorer or Virtuoso® ADE Assembler and the ADE waveform window, packaged with IC6.1.6/IC6.1.7 release, it was a common task to redo the measurements on plots every time the plot was refreshed or when a new simulation was set up.

How about a feature that lets you save the snapshot of the markers, zoom levels or any of the plot customizations? In addition, what if you are allowed to reuse this saved snapshot for later simulations? Or, let’s say you want to check a few different measurements on the waveform, for example, a delay, a rise time and a maximum value and use it across different runs.

And here you go... the most eagerly awaited Plotting Templates feature is here in IC6.1.8 and ICADVM18.1. Using this feature, time-consuming customizations on a plot can be saved and imported or exported across any maestro view. These can also be used in subsequent simulation runs. Watch these mini videos shown below to find out how!

For a detailed demonstration on how to use this feature, see the Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL – Plotting Templates video on https://support.cadence.com.

Creating New Plotting Templates

To begin the process of creating a new plotting template, you need to first add all the plot all the customizations you want to reuse. Then, in the Plotting Template form accessed using the File -> Create Maestro Plotting Template menu you can assign the template a unique name. This form can be alternatively accessed from the plotting toolbar in the Results tab of ADE Explorer and ADE Assembler.

The following video shows how to create a plotting template using a customized plot from one of the history items and reuse it across another history item:

When you click the Create Template button in the Plotting Template form, the new plotting template is saved and is added to the list of Existing Plotting Templates as shown below: 

Reusing Plotting Templates

Starting from IC6.1.8 and ICADVM18.1, the ADE Explorer and ADE Assembler windows have a new drop-down menu with the saved templates populated. To plot the new simulation results with the template, just select the required template from the drop-down and click the Plot All icon. The following video shows how the template created in the above video could be reused across corners. Plotting templates can also be imported from or exported to other maestro views. 

Saving Swap Sweep Variable Plots with Plotting Templates

A plot created with a Swap Sweep Variable can also be saved as a template. So, when we reuse this template, the X-axis is already set to the required variable by default. For detailed information about how to use this feature, refer to the ADE Plotting Templates RAK.

Related Resources

• Rapid Adoption Kits

  • ADE Plotting Templates 
  • Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL (Updated for IC6.1.8)

• Videos

  • Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL – Plotting Templates

• User Guide

  • Virtuoso ADE Explorer User Guide > Working with Plotting Templates 

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 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 Plotting!

Chandrika