What's Good About ADW’s Flow Manager? Check Out the ADW16.3 Release and See!

The ADW16.3 Allegro Design Workbench has a desktop cockpit that allows engineers to view their internal design processes and the applications applicable to each of the steps in their flow. The Workbench guides the engineer through the flow and provides a consistent approach to otherwise disparate processes across the entire design team. The Allegro Design Workbench (ADW) is fully configurable so that it can be modified to suit the individual customer needs.

Read on for more details …

Flow Manager GUI

The ADW GUI is divided into four main areas for the designer and five areas for librarians. The tree view on the Left Hand Side (LHS) of the workbench depicts the customer’s step-by-step design process from preliminary design through post-design. This flow is configurable so that steps or milestones can be added or deleted and icons changed.

Along the top edge of the workbench you can see the currently selected design, the name of the engineer logged-in and the full path to the project .cpm file. The workbench automatically remembers the last open design and returns you to that design when re-invoked, useful for engineers that are "occasional" users of the system. The third area -- Flow Specific Tools -- shows the applications specific to each step in the workflow, and finally the fourth area shows those applications that are generic across the entire flow.  

The Library Workbench displays a fifth area along the bottom edge of the window that shows the type, library and name of the model being constructed or edited.
The Design Workbench and Library Workbench are accessed by selecting a design project or a library project. This will reset the Workbench to become focused on the tasks related to design or library functions respectively.


 
By clicking on the tree view elements, you can see the contents of the hierarchical applications view showing those applications that are specific to the selected step in the process. This is configurable, so that customers can add their own applications or process-specific items.

The Design Process can be easily modified by those with Admin rights.  You can Add, Delete, Copy, Paste or move nodes graphically without having to do any coding.


Each project type has an assigned flow -- one for library, design, and highspeed. It’s easy to customize  both project types and flows. Flows are stored in files located in adw_conf_root. Flows files determine:

• Flowtree
• Toolbars
• Buttons
• Commands

Each tool can have its own Icon, Title and Tool tip along with a Primary command (exec) plus a Pre-Execute and Post- Execute command.  These allow the Admin to specify a check for pre-requisites or post-command cleanup. The Admin can use any language they are comfortable writing including Java, JavaScript, Tcl/TK, Perl and Shell scripting.

ADW Projects are linked to flows using the project .cpm and site.cpm files.Flows are kept in rdf files in the adw_conf_root area. Here’s how they are found:

 

The Flow Manager displays the company and site details. These are controlled in flowmanager.properties file:


Flow Manager States

Each designer can mark the status of the steps in the flow using the status icon. These steps are configurable at the site level by the administrator. If an administrator locks a flow step, the corresponding buttons for tool launches are grayed out. This is configured in the flowmanager.properties file. Select states from: complete, incomplete, clear_all, error, info, lock, active, skipped.

There can be different settings for admin and users. The state settings are info-only, except:
•    Locked: disables buttons
•    Complete: bubbles up & down
•    Clear all: bubbles down

 


Flow Manager Checklists

Checklists provide a quick and convenient way for users to ensure that they have completed all the necessary tasks. They also allow the overall status to be easily shared between team members working on the same design. Designers can use Flow Manager to create a set of checklist items to be completed for a particular step in the design process.

This is useful in that it tracks smaller tasks for each flow step, especially tasks that need to get done within a single tool. This is enabled from flowmanager.properties file. A handy toolbar on the lower right side is used for checklists (slides in & out of the toolbar). Checklist can be edited on the fly –
items added, deleted, etc. There is a standard checklist for each project and each project inherits a template checklist from the workspace at project creation.

 


And remember, please look at the Cadence Online Support ADW Product Page for more details.

Jerry “Genpart” Grzenia