Pegasus: Get your Wings: Pegasus Results Viewer

31 Aug 2021 • 4 minute read

You will agree with me that the earlier the bugs are caught the better it is for the overall design cost and time. If you have a robust debugging mechanism, the analysis and fixing of errors becomes quite easy.

Pegasus Verification System has a robust and smart debugging solution called Pegasus Results Viewer (Pegasus RV). It has an easy to use interface and offers following and more:

A unified interface for all types of flows (DRC, LVS, ERC, PERC, and so on).
Advanced run directories management: you can open multiple run directories of different types.
A tab-based interface with different partitions gives a comprehensive information of a run’s results, which makes it easy to interpret and analyze them.
Advanced debugging tools to navigate through results and debug effectively.

To do justice to the Pegasus Results Viewer feature, I will divide this topic in three separate blogs: DRC, LVS and PERC. In this blog, we will focus on Pegasus Results Viewer for DRC.

Pegasus Results Viewer for DRC

You can view and analyze the DRC, Antenna and Density results using Pegasus Results Viewer. Pegasus RV for DRC provides you:

Smooth navigation
Histograms
Compact mode
Effective File Management
Option to merge result from different rules or files
Color Management
Multiple layout windows support in Virtuoso
Density Heatmap in Pegasus Interactive
Option to set Preferences locally as well as globally

Pegasus RV allows you to navigate through Pegasus results using Run Browser, Rule/Cell Browser, Markers Browser, Rule Details section and Marker Properties section.

Pegasus RV opens the run directory and therefore provides easy access to all files, which are generated by the run, through Run Browser. As needed, you can open any particular ASCII/RDB file.

You can open multiple files in different tabs. It helps you do a comprehensive analysis by viewing and comparing them parallelly.

You can also customize how you want to view the results. Pegasus RV offers a great deal of customization options, such as:

Switch the viewing mode to Cell/Rule or Rule/Cell
Select the mode: Hierarchical or Flat
Select how to highlight the markers: at the top level, inside a cell or inside a cell in Edit-In-Place (EIP) mode (Virtuoso only).
Filter Rules and Cells to find the rules and cells of interest and hide others.
Customize columns per your requirement. Keeping only the ones that you need.

You have customized the view and now it is time to get to the business; to have a closer look at the errors and take some actions.

There are two modes of viewing errors: on-demand and auto-highlight. You can view the errors and after the analysis assign appropriate status to them, such as Fixed, Waived, Error, Critical, Visited, Warning, and Info.

In the above screenshot, you can see that each rule has been assigned a unique color to it. When you select a rule or cell, the error is highlighted with that color. You can easily manage the colors using the color selector with a simple right click.

If DRC violations have properties attached to the markers, Pegasus RV can detect them and show them as a table. You can make navigating through violations even easier by using options such as sorting, filtering by values, and so on.

Another interesting feature is the Compact Mode. It allows you to navigate through markers and takes minimum space on the display. The screen reduces to a banner as shown below:

Density Violations

Pegasus RV has an enhanced way to debug density violations. Density rules usually generate two additional files, which provide violation details: Print and RDB files. If there is a density violation, then rule name will be listed in the Rule/Cell Browser.

Pegasus RV allows you to highlight any window in the viewer to see its properties, build histograms for the selected set of markers and build a density heatmap as shown below.