Virtuoso Studio: Creating Regular Patterns with Group Array

Our new AI-powered custom design solution, Virtuoso Studio, leverages our 30 years of industry knowledge and leadership, providing innovative features, reimagined infrastructure for unrivaled productivity, and new levels of integration that stretch beyond classic design boundaries. In this blog series, learn how the best analog design tools just got better to help you keep pace with your challenging design issues.

Guess what’s common between these two pictures below? Well, one common thing is that there are patterns repeated all over the design. Imagine if you had to design something like this on your computer and create each item individually, how tedious and time-consuming that would be. This is exactly where group arrays come into the picture in your IC designs in Virtuoso Studio!

Certain custom and digital designs, such as those containing memory arrays and routing channels, might require patterns of objects to be repeated 100s of times across a design. Rather than adding each object individually, you can use group arrays to create regular patterns in your layouts. Group arrays help you keep your designs simple because they do not introduce any additional level of hierarchy in a design. Also, you get the flexibility to customize group array attributes, post-creation.

The image below shows a simple design containing three devices and a power rail, with routing created only for the first device by using a pathSeg.

Instead of manually adding pathSegs for the remaining devices, you can quickly create routing for all the other devices by using a group array. The following image shows the pathSeg copied to create a 1x3 group array with one row and three columns, which means it has three members.

Benefits of using a Group Array

A great design is not built in a day; it requires continuous enhancements.

Group arrays support the power of synchronous editing, additionally maintaining uniform spacing between the members of an array. Any change you make to an individual member of a group array is instantly propagated to all the other members. This immensely speeds up your pace to make changes.

To ensure design integrity, you can lock group arrays, thereby preventing designers from modifying the spacing modes and values used in group arrays. This implies that for an existing group array that has spacing defined, you can choose to lock the space settings so that they cannot be modified.

You can easily edit group arrays by using interactive editing commands like Stretch. You can also use the property editor assistant to modify attributes such as the number of rows and columns, spacing between members, lock status, and the orientation pattern of a group array.

In your layouts, you can create group arrays right from where you might need them, that is, while copying objects, while generating selected schematic instances directly in a layout view, or while generating clones. You can also create group arrays using SKILL.

With designs becoming increasingly complex, group arrays can be immensely helpful when you wish to quickly add regular patterns to your designs. Go for it today and reap the benefits of enhanced productivity and design integrity!

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Happy Reading!

Savita Thakur and Rohini Garg