Virtuoso layout hierarchical copy contains mysterious residue from other libraries

Dear chenwanw,

chenyanw said:

So where does the Virtuoso copy tool find such information and how can I delete it?

I believe the data.dm file may have information about cells in a library and other libraries. Please take a look at Andrew's response a number of years ago concerning what the data.dm file contains at the Cadence On-line support site URL:

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_technology_forums/f/custom-ic-design/37085/what-is-the-use-of-data-dm-and-constraint-in-each-design-directory

chenyanw said:

It is very strange that Lib_A shows up. While we did copy design from Lib_A when Lib_B was initially created, I have removed every instance in Lib_B/Cell_target. So I don't know where they are coming from.

As you are doing a hierarchical copy, there may be instances within the Lib_debug layout that are subcircuits from Lib_A or Lib-B and hence the "Copy Problems" GUI you included in your posting show cells from Lib_A and Lib_B. If you deleted the cells, maybe you did not update the data.dm file and hence it shows the cells.

Does this help at all chenyanw?

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for your reply. It's been my suspicion with data.dm. I have used ddGetObj to decode and read them (I have data.dm in the library and view level). However, I still can't find any reference to Lib_A. Is there anything in data.dm that can't be read out by ddGetObj...?

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for your reply. It's been my suspicion with data.dm. I have used ddGetObj to decode and read them (I have data.dm in the library and view level). However, I still can't find any reference to Lib_A. Is there anything in data.dm that can't be read out by ddGetObj...?

Dear chenyanw,

chenyanw said:

However, I still can't find any reference to Lib_A. Is there anything in data.dm that can't be read out by ddGetObj...?

I am sorry, but I do not have the background to provide a useful comment to your question. Perhaps the experts who follow this Forum might have some insight.

Shawn

I don't think it's going to be in the data.dm files. Most likely there's a reference in the layout database to the cellView.

Two things I'd try:

1. Doing a Edit->Hierarchy->Tree from the source cellView to see if you can spot it that way
2. Running "oaScan -lib Lib_B -cell ... -view layout" on each of the cells in lib B that it's copying to see if it spots any "header" references that have got messed up (I've seen this happen sometimes where an empty header reference is left). If it reports any such references, run again with -repair to fix them. (the oaScan is run from the UNIX command line)

It might be something else, but it's hard to know without seeing the data - so contacting customer support would be best.

Regards,

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your reply! Sorry I didn't get an email notification and just saw you had replied me. I had done #1 before I posted and it didn't show any Lib_A reference.

I just did #2, and it doesn't seem like there's any error to repair:

No inconsistencies found in 1 database
- found in 0 of 1 design

My colleague has contacted support (case number 46569396 ) Hope they can help us figure out why! :)

OK - I took a quick look at the case and it appears progress is being made (although it doesn't sound precisely like what you've described - it seems to be mainly concerned with the behaviour when you have constraint views during copy). Anyway, support is the right way to handle this issue, so glad it's progressing.

Andrew

Thank you Andrew. We did have a constraint view but it was not in the views to copy list in my Copy View snapshot. Also the layout had constraints yes but as I mentioned got deleted before the copy operation. That's why I didn't mention it here.