ADE EXPLORER - use existing netlist

Hi Andrew,

The reason I'm needing to do this is to identify which parasitic capacitance are the ones responsible for coupling undesired signals into our analog chain. By removing/changing individual capacitances in the netlist I can track this down quite quickly. I see all the capacitances in the input.scs, I'm unsure of the location of the file named netlist, I can't find one in the simulation directories. There is an artSimEvnLog file of 0 bytes in the netlist folder.

Hi Andrew,

The reason I'm needing to do this is to identify which parasitic capacitance are the ones responsible for coupling undesired signals into our analog chain. By removing/changing individual capacitances in the netlist I can track this down quite quickly. I see all the capacitances in the input.scs, I'm unsure of the location of the file named netlist, I can't find one in the simulation directories. There is an artSimEvnLog file of 0 bytes in the netlist folder.

The file netlist should be in the same directory as the input.scs (i.e. in the netlist directory). In Explorer you can use Window->Toolbars->Results and then hit the little terminal icon which should open the terminal just above the netlist dir (assuming you're only running a single simulation and not sweeps or corners).

There are other ways of filtering parasitics using the parasitic aware design capabilities, but that's a bit more complicated to explain quickly than doing what you're doing for now...

Regards,

Andrew.

HI Andrew, 

OK, got it now. Cheers.

It is also recreating the netlist file every time I run the simulation. It is a single transient I'm trying to run.  I haven't added any settings to force generation of a netlist. Is there a way to check that the default setting is not forcing a regeneration of a netlist.

Hi Nick,

Now that I've tried this, I see a similar problem. The trouble is that the netlist creation with Explorer and Assembler are quite complicated now in order to efficiently re-use as much of the netlist as possible across sweeps and I think this is getting in the way - so I'm not entirely sure of the right way to do what you want.

One way that would work is to use the Reference Netlist flow in ADE Assembler though. There's a Rapid Adoption Kit on this which will probably help. The idea of that is that you can definitely avoid recreating the netlist when using that flow. So without spending a lot of time (which unfortunately I don't have) trying to figure out a way around netlist recreation in ADE Explorer, I'd suggest using the Reference Netlist mechanism in Assembler instead.

Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Andrew, We don't have Assembler, we only have explorer. I had a look for the reference netlist option earlier (I remember it from ade XL...I think), but couldn't find it in Explorer.

Unfortunately Reference Netlist is only in Assembler.

I tried a number of things but it always seems to get overwritten no matter what I change (not sure why, because it's clearly not completely renetlisting). So there may be somewhere it can be changed but I can't find it. From a recent R&D discussion (CCR 2145440) they did say there that it's only supported via the reference netlist flow.

It would probably be best to follow this up with customer support as then an application engineer can follow this up with R&D to see if there's a way of doing this by editing precisely the right file (I wondered if editing one of the ihnl/cds*/netlist files would do it, but no matter which I edited, it didn't seem to work...

Regards,

Andrew.

You might want to take a look at https://support.cadence.com/apex/techpubDocViewerPage?path=parasim/parasimIC6.1.8/chap1.html#pgfId-1046498. We have used this feature very successfully for this purpose.