ASCII waveform file format for Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL?

If you can get the captured waveforms into VCSV format, you'll be able to display them inside spectre. I'm not sure if there's a utility that can take tr0 and convert to VCSV but you can export a sample spectre waveform as VCSV format to see roughly how the ASCII file is organized and then try to get your captured waveform data to conform to this format by hand.

Once you have the VCSV format, you can go to Visualization and Analysis XL and open the waveform (File -> Open Results...) and then use the trace as if it's just like any other trace from spectre. 

In the ViVA calculator, there's also the "getAsciiWave" function which will read simple multi-column data and convert it into waveforms.

As suggested above, the VCSV format is relatively straightforward; it's comma-separated-value with some additional header information in comments at the top of the file to give information about signal names, type of data, and so on - it provides more info for ViVA to know how to plot the data.

There is also the "psf" utility to convert psf format data from ASCII to binary. However, constructing a file that looks like ASCII PSF is going to be a lot more work than using VCSV.

We also have an enhancement request to be able to directly open simple CSV files in ViVA - but it's not been implemented yet (it would need some kind of import UI to assign signals to columns, a bit like you get when you import a text file in Excel).

Best Regards,

Andrew.

Thanks Andrew, I'm using VCSV as you suggested.  Easy to create with a little perl script and VIVA is reading the files (over 3000 of them!) fine :-)

Having done what I set out to do, I'm now going to be greedy and ask for more...

Is there a full description of VCSV format you could point me at?  The actual waveforms are in the VCSV files but there are over 100 other signals that are static (in any one file) but would be good to use/reference in VIVA (eg power supply voltage, configuraion inputs etc).  Adding these in every line of each VCSV file would be ridiculous on disk space.  Is there a way to have 2 waveform sections in a VCSV file, one could be the waveforms with few signals and many time points, and one all the many static signals with just one (or if preferred 2 - begin & end) time points?  Or if I put the static waveforms only on the first and last lines could I omit them from the rest?

Andy

Andy,

It's not documented, but easy enough to reverse engineer. I did this recently to write a SKILL function to dump out waveforms to VCSV, in fact.

There's no need to have the same number of points in every waveform.  See the attached example. It's a bit fussy about having spaces between the commas on the columns with no data though.

You can't have multiple blocks in the VCSV files, as far as I know.

Regards,

Andrew.

Thanks Andrew,

Sorry if I'm being dumb here, but how can I download the attachment?  I can see its a link to http://www.cadence.com/Community/CSSharedFiles/forums/storage/38/1323815/stuff.vcsv but when I click on it / do Save Link As...  all I get is a "The page cannot be found" message / html file?

AndyS

Andy,

You weren't being dumb. I think the system objected to the type of file uploaded - so I edited the post and replaced the attachment with a ".txt" file instead (exactly the same file, I just changed the suffix). It appears to be OK now.

Regards,

Andrew.