Five-Minute Tutorial: Start the New Year with Voltus

Happy New Year to all of our Digital Implementation Blog readers - and also to anyone new who is stopping by to check us out. We're glad you're here and we hope you'll hang out with us for a while! 

I thought we could start this new year with one of Cadence's newest tools: Voltus IC Power Integrity Solution. You can read all the official details in this news article, but if you're a digital designer like me, you probably want to dive right in and start using it. Today I'll point you to some great starting documentation, and then in my next several blog posts, I'll highlight some scripts for getting started.

Voltus is our next-generation power analysis tool, so if you've used Vstorm or EPS in the past, you will be quite familiar with what's going on. However, the command syntax has changed and the flow has been streamlined, so there is some new stuff to learn. If you're new to Cadence power analysis, don't worry - the streamlined flow makes it easier to get into.

(Note: you'll need a Cadence Online Support login to access the following documents.)

For those of you migrating from Vstorm or EPS, check out this handy app note: EPS to Voltus Migration. In this document, you'll find:

• licensing info
• how to start the tool
• pointers to translation utilities for your existing scripts
• an explanation of the new power grid library view types and how they are used (there used to be 8 different kinds, now there are only 3 - much better!)

For everyone, I highly recommend going through the Voltus Rapid Adoption Kit, or RAK. It's a lab document and a downloadable database that you can use to actually run Voltus on a small test design and see how everything works. The lab material has a lot of good background information in it as well. I've been using Cadence power analysis tools for quite some time, and even I learned some great new stuff just by reading this. You'll get to play with things like:

• power grid library generation
• static power analysis
• static rail analysis
• dynamic power analysis
• dynamic rail analysis
• vectorless and vector-based analysis
• how to look at results in report files, plots, graphs, etc.

Finally, here is a quick FAQ to wrap up some other questions you may have. It also has links to the Migration Document and the RAK.

Stay tuned for more Voltus posts, where we'll quickly highlight scripts from the RAK to get you up and running ASAP. (But I know you type-A engineers will be working ahead and exploring the RAK on your own. In fact, you have probably already downloaded it!)

- Kari Summers