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Layout pcell label tinkering

CADcasualty

I've been slowly working my way towards making Virtuoso work with everything on a white background. On the layout side I have an issue with instantiated pcells that I'm using (I didn't make them) - they are showing big unsightly black reverse video pin labels that I want to change the color scheme of. I have attached some screenshots. The first is the layout view of the pcell itself and the second is a screenshot of the instantiated pcell (that shows the labels I'm complaining about). As I zoom further and further out these black label boxes don't shrink correspondingly and my layout becomes dominated by those ugly things. The label is actually bound to the drawing layer it is associated with i.e. if I make that layer invisible then the labels go away but so does all of the data in the layer itself (which is obviously no good). I would have thought the labels had a different LPP I could manipulate. The third screenshot is the same as the second only all I did was turn of the visibility of POLY1 i.e. it shows the label and the POLY1 all becoming invisible together. Does anybody know how I can separately control the coloring of the black label boxes? Thanks in advance. 

(Hmmm - I'm adding the screenshots by dragging them into the editor window as instructed but after doing so they appear as generic boxes with a question mark. Hopefully they appear correctly when I submit the post)

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  • Andrew Beckett

    OK, a lot of the controls for this are under the Options->Net Name Display form in Virtuoso Layout Suite XL. This allows you to control the colour of the text, whether the background is drawn or not - or even if it shows the net names at all (it's actually not the pcells that are responsible for this - it's just VLS XL trying to show you the net names as this can be rather useful).

    There are cdsenv variables too to control much of this - if you search in cdnshelp for netNameDisplayDrawBackground you'll find that env var and see others nearby in the documentation so you can seed your settings.

    The one thing that is less obvious - if you have chosen to draw with the background (which is the default), how does it decide what colour to draw the background in? Well, the good news is that this is configurable too. It uses a packet name called netNameBackground. If that doesn't exist, it gets created - but if you already have it defined, it will get used. You may also see netNameForeground appear, but this is created automatically from the user foreground colour specified on the Net Display options form and from the corresponding cdsenv.

    Regards,

    Andrew.

Reply
  • Andrew Beckett

    OK, a lot of the controls for this are under the Options->Net Name Display form in Virtuoso Layout Suite XL. This allows you to control the colour of the text, whether the background is drawn or not - or even if it shows the net names at all (it's actually not the pcells that are responsible for this - it's just VLS XL trying to show you the net names as this can be rather useful).

    There are cdsenv variables too to control much of this - if you search in cdnshelp for netNameDisplayDrawBackground you'll find that env var and see others nearby in the documentation so you can seed your settings.

    The one thing that is less obvious - if you have chosen to draw with the background (which is the default), how does it decide what colour to draw the background in? Well, the good news is that this is configurable too. It uses a packet name called netNameBackground. If that doesn't exist, it gets created - but if you already have it defined, it will get used. You may also see netNameForeground appear, but this is created automatically from the user foreground colour specified on the Net Display options form and from the corresponding cdsenv.

    Regards,

    Andrew.

Children
  • CADcasualty
    in reply to Andrew Beckett

    Thanks very much Andrew. My documentation searching was more focused on the word label than name :-/. Anyway, you've fixed my problem yet again and I'm back to work!

  • Andrew Beckett
    in reply to CADcasualty

    Glad to help!

    The netNameBackground packet name seems to be cunningly hidden (in invisible ink) in the documentation. I'll file a request to get it documented.

    Regards,

    Andrew.

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