What's Good About Allegro® Design Entry HDL – User Customizations? You Tell Me!

Well ... if you like tweaking and tuning an environment to suit your needs, Allegro Design Entry HDL (DEHDL or previously known as ConceptHDL) has plenty to offer.

I began in the Blog-sphere-posting-world of Cadence with one of my first posts titled - "How many DEHDL (Concept) designers customize their DEHDL environment?" You can read the details here

Although I asked about this almost a year ago, the relevance still applies today:

• How many designers customize the DEHDL environment to suit their taste?
• Do you add just a few hotkeys (softkeys), or strokes?
• Do you adjust the toolbars?
• Do you customize the menus and add your own commands?

All this has been possible for years, and novices to DEHDL can really take advantage of this to make the environment more efficient to the tools they've used in the past.

I wrote a paper about this for last year's CDNLive! 2008 event in San Jose. The presentation can be found here -
(look under the "VII. PCB Design" section). You'll see that several of the customizations I employed in the SPB16.01 release were included as part of the new SPB16.2 Windows mode in DEHDL. But, there are still several areas of customization that can be explored.

The intent was to show the myriad methods available to customize the environment and in some scenarios, make it simpler for the new designer to adopt using the product. All the details and reasons can be found in my paper. Efficiency, productivity, and enablers to get the job done are key to customizing DEHDL.

As always - I look forward to our discussion on this topic and sharing/exploring new ways to customize DEHDL!

Jerry GenPart