What's Good About the SPB16.2 Cross Referencer? Active Links in the Schematic!

That's right - an often requested feature from several customers has now been implemented in the SPB16.2 release.

Just a quick "behind the scenes" glimpse of what several Product Team Support AEs provide during each major SPB product release planning. While the Marketing, Technical Marketing, Sales AEs, and R&D help drive the product features guided by customer input and feedback, the SPB Support AEs review the volume of duplicate Service Requests (SRs) and CCRs on a periodic basis and during the next release feature prioritization planning, we provide this valuable information to the entire product team. In most cases, those SRs with a higher volume of associated CCRs (duplicate CCRs) are prioritized so that the bug or enhancement can be included in the upcoming release. It's a great exercise that takes several planning sessions and the Product Team Support AEs are pleasantly rewarded when we can be the voice of the customer and help drive product direction - eventually seeing the feature coded into a future product release!

 OK - now to the specifics of one such customer driven feature now available in the SPB16.2 release.

The Cross Referencer (CRefer) is a utility which is used for the verification and debugging of designs by following a signal’s
path throughout the design. This utility traces the flow of a signal over the complete design by annotating some properties on the schematic which makes the signal navigation simpler. The properties annotated on the schematic sheet consist of one or more of the following:

• Signal Name

• Block Name

• Page Number

• Zone Information

Since the property values are visible on the schematic sheets, they can be converted to hyperlinks. These hyperlinks can be used for navigation purpose and when you click on any link, you are taken to the location (hierarchical block and schematic sheet) specified in the link. This improves the tracing of the signal in the design.

By default, the cross-references in your design are not active links. You need to add a .cpm directive to activate them. You add the HYPERLINKS directive in the START_CONCEPTHDL section of your project's .cpm file to activate the Cref links functionality for a design.

START_CONCEPTHDL
...
HYPERLINKS 'TRUE'
...
END_CONCEPTHDL

After adding the cpm directive, you need to run the CRefer utility once to activate the Cref Links:

1. Open the project(*.cpm) in Project Manager.
2. Select Tools > CRefer from the main menu.
3. Click Run.
4. Click OK.

Using Cref Links:

After activating the Cref links, click an XR value (or) a cross reference value and Design Entry HDL (DEHDL) displays the target location on the schematic. As you hover the mouse over a Cref link, the cursor changes to a hand pointer. When you click the XR (or) the cross reference value on the target net, it takes you back to the original location.

We hope this new capability will make navigating design content in DEHDL more efficient.

I'd like to hear from those who've asked for this capability and see if it meets your expectations.

Jerry GenPart