Dotted lines by default in ViVA

If you are plotting signals from within ADE, and the display.drf for your PDK has the layers y0-y9 (drawing purpose) with their packet set to a dotted pattern, then that's what will happen (this happens for any schematic signals that are plotted - I wouldn't expect it to affect results of calculator expressions).

You could fix your display.drf or tell ViVA not to use the display.drf settings:

envSetVal("asimenv.plotting" "useDisplayDrf" 'boolean nil) 
; use the below if you want to override the other default line styles.
;envSetVal("viva.trace" "lineThickness" 'string "Thick")
;envSetVal("viva.trace" "lineStyle" 'string "dot") 

Note that the useDisplayDrf control was only added in IC616 ISR9. That's a while back (October 2014) but you didn't say which version you're using.

Regards,

Andrew

Thanks! I tried that but I got the error below. 

*Error* eval: undefined function - toolname envSetVal("asimenv.plotting" "useDisplayDrf" 'boolean nil) *WARNING* envSetVal: Can't set the value of variable 'useDisplayDrf', in tool[.partition] 'asimenv.plotting' - it has not been registered. nil

My version is IC6.16-64b.101.

You're using the base release of IC616 (so that's from getting on for 6 years ago), and that's before the version I mentioned containing the enhancement. So you either need to move to something newer than the that version or you need to edit the display.drf to make the packets used for y0-y9 have solid lines.

Andrew

Could you tell me where can I find display.drf and edit it?

Could you tell me where can I find display.drf and edit it?

It would help if you specified which PDK you're using as that might help narrow this down a bit. However, I expect that the display.drf will be in the root directory of the PDK (so the directory containing the technology library). You can find out what packet name is being used by using the abDebugPacket code in this post. Then use abDebugPacket("y0" "drawing") and abDebugPacket("y1" "drawing") etc to find out what the packet names are (in case they've been changed away from the default names, which happens with some PDKs). Do this with a schematic window open which is in a library attached to the technology library you're using - e.g. in your test bench schematic for the scenario where you get the dotted lines in ViVA.

Regards,

Andrew.

This is what happens when I paste the abDebugPacket  into CIW. It doesn't seem to do anything. 
The PDK I am using is tsmc8. 
Thanks for help.

and error when I executed the command abDebugPacket("y0" "drawing")

The warning messages say that "the winow is not a graphic editor window". You need to have the schematic open associated with ADE, and make sure it's the current window - e.g. hit a bindkey in that schematic window (just hitting the shift key would be enough) or selecting a menu (any menu) to make the window current. Then execute the abDebugPacket function.

Regards,

Andrew

Hi, 
I got this. What should I do next?

OK, that tells you the packet names - they are called "y1_drawing" and "y0_drawing" and  you can see the line style is "dashed". You could use the Tools->Display Resource Editor (the menu is something like that - I'm on a train and can't check), find those packets and change the definitions interactively. You could then save the display.drf and in future sessions you could load it with drLoadDrf("/path/to/display.drf" t) (after opening the schematics because the PDK will load its default).

Or, if you have write access to the PDK installation, look at the root of the PDK installation (the directory containing the technology library) and look at the display.drf there. You can then edit this in a text editor and edit the definition of y0_drawing etc to match the display.drf you saved from the tool above.

Regards,

Andrew.