What's Good About DEHDL Usability Improvements? The Secret's in the SPB16.2 Release!

The Design Entry HDL (DEHDL) usability improvements are many and significant in the SPB16.2 release!

The DEHDL product moves even closer to other Windows based applications, such as Capture CIS, Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office applications, in terms of the general usability standards. These changes provide support for common Windows commands and operations making Design Entry HDL more user-friendly and easy to use.

The usability changes are available under the Windows mode, which is a new UI mode introduced in Design Entry HDL.

I'll cover some of the more frequently used capabilities below.

The usability changes are available under the Windows mode, which is a new UI mode introduced in Design Entry HDL. To use the available changes, you need to enable the Windows mode.

Follow the steps below to enable the Windows mode:

1. Choose Tools> Options.

2. In the General page of the Design Entry HDL dialog box, select the Enable Windows Mode checkbox in the Preferences section.

3. Click OK.

In the SPB16.2 release of DEHDL, the most prominent change you will notice is the reorganization of menus.

The menus are organized in such a way that they now fit into 12 menus in the Windows mode as compared to the 14 menus in the normal mode. You'll notice that some of the main menu names have changed, some menu commands are accessible from the same locations with little or no change in the sequence, while some others have either moved to a new menu or are now nested inside a new or existing submenu for increased granularity.

Some of the sub-menu items have been moved while some others have been reorganized/added to maintain a synchrony with Capture CIS and other windows based applications.

Note: If you are unable to see the reorganized menu bar select Tools> Customize> Menus and click on the 'Reset' button.

The Design Entry HDL Options dialog box has been changed to maintain a similar look  to the Preferences dialog box of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Instead of the tabbed pages, the page names appear in a neatly organized tree structure on the left panel. Rest of the functionality remains the same.

A bounding box with anchor points or handles around a component appears when you click a component on a schematic in the Windows mode. This acts as a selection indicator. The mouse pointer changes to a move pointer when you hover the mouse over the handles. This indicates that you can move the component around. When you move a component, all the wires connected to it also move with it.

You can also rotate a component by clicking the mouse pointer on the handles at the edges. As you move the mouse pointer to one of the four edges of a bounding box, it changes to a rotate pointer. You can click at this point and the component is rotated in the direction of the rotation arrow.

Another important change done to bring Design Entry HDL closer to a standard Windows application is the support for keyboard functions, such as CTRL+C for copy and CTRL+V for paste. You can now copy objects from the Windows clipboard on to a schematic using the keyboard shortcuts. The other keyboard operations supported are listed in the following table:

The Attributes form appears as the Properties window in the Windows mode. It is a dockable window. As soon as you select an object on the schematic, the Properties window is populated with the properties information of the object, be it a component or a net. The window has icons to add, delete, and save properties and to load and save a property (.attr) file. The dockable attributes window saves time as you do not need to redisplay the form when you reenter attributes form.

Design Entry HDL now provides a method to quickly identify all the components which have unconnected pins. This option is made available through the following console command:

Set  SHOW_UNCONNECTED_PIN  ON

Notice that all the unconnected pins are marked with pink dots. Also, you can see the unconnected pins by selecting Component> Unconnected Pins from the main menu.

The Global Navigate window now consists of three icons: Next, Previous, and Zoom by points. If the Zoom by points button is depressed, it zooms to selected region in the schematic as you navigate back and forth across the nets using the Previous and Next icons.

As always, I welcome your feedback and discussion on how you're using these new features and any suggestions you may have on how to improve the DEHDL interface.

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia