BoardSurfers: Training Insights: Loading SKILL Programs Automatically

Imagine you are on a vacation with your family, and suddenly, your phone starts buzzing. You pick it up and what are you looking at is a bunch of pending, unanswered e-mails. You start recollecting the checklist you had made before taking off only to realize that you haven’t put on the automatic replies! Now you are here, regretting, replying to all the pending emails one by one, while your family is enjoying somewhere at the beach.

Automation plays a momentous role in our daily life, whether it is automatic mail replies, coffee machines, Amazon’s Alexa, and so on. Ever wondered if there’s something to do with automation within the layout editors? Well, you can automatically load SKILL programs and run them within Allegro® Layout Editors.

Cadence SKILL is a high-level, interactive programming language based on the popular artificial intelligence language ‘Lisp’. It lets you customize and extend your design environment. Using SKILL, you can validate the steps of your algorithm incrementally before incorporating them into a larger program.

Once you start loading SKILL programs automatically, the inevitable need to load the entire absolute path of the directory where your program file resides will perish. You can then automatically load as many SKILL routines as you want to, so that every time the Allegro® Layout Editor starts, those routines will get loaded in.

I am sure that loading SKILL programs automatically will save you a lot of time because who wants to do a task manually when there is an option to do the same task automatically?

And finally, if you haven’t read the previous ‘How To’ on Creating Custom Reports Using ‘Extract’, then do give it a shot.

Thanks for reading and see you next time for more on Training Insights. Stay tuned ‘till then.

To learn more about this feature, watch the How to Automatically Load SKILL Programs within the Allegro PCB Editor video on the Cadence Support portal. Click the video link now or visit Cadence Support and search for this video under Video Library.

For more information about the SKILL language, see Getting Started in the SKILL Language User Guide.

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