What's Good About APD’s Wirebond Color Visibility? You’ll Need the 16.5 Release to See!

Prior to the 16.0 release, color and visibility (CV) settings of bond wires in Allegro Package Designer were based on the traditional layer model whereby wires were represented as 2-dimensional cline objects that could be colored and made visible or invisible depending on the layer they were on. In 16.0, bond wires were implemented as true 3-dimensional objects in the database, and their CV were set according to their profiles.

The 16.5 release has made improvements to increase the designer’s efficiency in setting the CV attributes.

Read on for more details …

Setting the wire profile visibility in Visibility tab

With the new profile-based model, users are able to set the wire visibility in the Visibility tab. The following snapshots portray the Color form and the corresponding Visibility tab that lists wire profiles:

 


 

The list of profiles starts after the last displayed layer. The profile list is the same as that in the Color form (i.e. the profiles in the database are listed in alphabetical order). If there are no profiles, nothing is listed after the layer list. The visibility tab is scrollable such that if there are a lot of profiles to be listed, they can all be accessed through the scroll bar. The workings of the check-boxes are the same as those for the layers - the result of setting or unsetting visibility is seen directly on the canvas. There is also a check-box at the top of the profile to quickly set or unset the visibility of all profiles.

Eliminate WIRE subclass visibility setting

Since 16.0, users have found indirect ways to affect the visibility of wires without going through the profile interface. In 16.5, we made the following changes in various areas of the tool:

• Hide the WIRE subclass check-box in the Color form and the Color command form so that users cannot directly manipulate the visibility of this subclass.
• Ensure that changes in WIRE subclass visibility from other applications get reflected to the profile visibility as well.

Setting Wire DRC visibility in Visibility tab

You can now set the visibility setting of the Wire DRC directly in the Visibility tab. This check-box is similar to the one in the Color Form:

 
Being able to toggle this check-box in the Visibility tab allows for faster access to display or undisplay Wire DRCs in the canvas; toggling it OFF (background color) will undisplay all the Wire DRC markers (regardless of profiles), and toggling it ON (with the selected Wire DRC color) will show all those markers.

I look forward to your comments.

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia