Schematic entry parameter as a function of instance name

Certainly not "automatically"

Let's ignore the provided SUBCKT syntax provided and try something that PSpice might actually process:

.SUBCKT MYCKT 1 2

+ PARAMS: MYFILE=SOMEPATH.TXT

IX 1 2 PWL FILE {MYFILE}

.ENDS

Check the PSpice Users Guide and PSpice Reference Guide PDFs for more precise details.

If you use the model editor to create the Capture part, the part will have a "MYFILE" property that you can put the filename into within the schematic. NOTE SPICE, and therefore, PSpice netlist lines cannot exceed 80 characters in total, so you will to bear that in mind when specifying the filename, also the full filename and path should be specified and should not contain spaces. This method is not really a vast difference over the provided IPWL File part though.

Since the question was about spectre, I'd also say it's not directly possible in spectre - but you could use a similar approach as outlined by oldmouldy. I wondered about using the percent keywords in the filename, but looking at the available percent codes, none is the hierarchical path to the instance (search in cdnshelp for MMSIM71/72 say for "percent").

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hi, thank you for your replies. You are right Andrew, as I am using spectre oldmouldy's approach is not very straightforward. The point is that I have to instantiate and interconect 1024 instances of the same subcircuit (a pixel), and that each instance needs to be excited with a different independent current source, and that each current source has a different dc value. I don't want to entry all the 1024 schematic instances by hand. Do you think that skill language can be helpfull for this?...the truth is that I know nothing about skill programming...

Thanks and regards,

Pedro

Maybe. You could potentially have some SKILL code which set the fileName parameter on each instance to something unique.

I'm afraid it's beyond what I have time to help with this week - so I'd recommend either hoping that somebody else on the forum can help, or speaking to Cadence Customer Support (anyway I'd have had to uncover a bit more about how things were structured, or give an example that you could tweak to suit your needs).

Regards,

Andrew.

 Ok, thank you Andrew. I think that the easiest solution now would be to entry just the schematic of one pixel, to use the Analog Artist to generate the netlist of this one pixel subcircuit, and then incorporate this subcircuit into some c++ code that generates netlist of the full 32x32 pixel matrix (I know how to program in c++). In the mean time I will try to learn the basics of skill programming so I can find a better solution next time...

Thanks again for your answers,

Pedro 

It seems to me that the best approach would be to write Skill to generate your schematic. Making the parameter dynamically depend on the instance name wouldn't help you very much. Since you'll probably need to explicitly define the instance names, you might as well explicitly define the parameter (pwl file name) at the same time. You could also enhance the code below to wire up your array.

procedure(buildPixelArray(@optional (cv geGetEditCellView()))
  let((myLib myCell myView origin instName fileName)
    myLib = "myLib"
    myCell = "pixelCkt"
    myView = "symbol"
    for(col 0 31
        for(row 0 31
            origin = list(row col)
            sprintf(instName "Pixel_%02d_%02d" row col)
            sprintf(fileName "/path/to/pwl/%s.pwl" instName)
            inst = dbCreateParamInstByMasterName(cv myLib myCell myView
                instName
                origin
                "R0"
                1
                list(
                    list("myPwlParam" "string" fileName)
                )
            )
        )
    )
  ) ;let
) ;proc

Run this code with an empty schematic open for edit.

Derek

Hi, thank you very much dmay! I will try the code and see what happens!