validating setup procedure taking very long time

Dear Mahdi,

MahdiRJ94 said:

I am using cadence virtuoso ICADVM20.1-64b. when I add "calibre" in the environment to run the post-layout simulation, it takes long time to start netlisting. When I hit the run bottom in ADE assembler, the status is validating setup. I am not sure if this time is due to  the large design volume, or this is due to the something else

I'm not sure what exactly you mean when your wrote "add "calibre" in the environment", but if you are suggesting you are changing from using a schematic view of a subcircuit to using a layout based view (i.e., some type of extracted view), then the time required for the netlisting process can be be significantly longer than that for netlisting the subcircuit using its schematic view. If your extracted view includes both resistances and capacitances, the number of nets in the extracted view can be much larger than the number of nets in the schematic view based netlist. Multi-finger devices that appear as a single device with a multiplication factor M in your schematic view based netlist are usually expanded to M individual devices in your extracted view based netlist. It is not unusual in my experience for the netlisting process of a relatively complex subcircuit to require an order of magnitude (or more) longer than the time for its schematic netlisting.

MahdiRJ94 said:

Besides, during that period of time (validation setup), there is a warning in log: "*WARNING* (DB-260008): dbOpenBag: Fail to open prop. bag for 'calibre' in 'r' mode, file not found". 

I don't think this warning relates your observation of the time required for netlisting.

You did not indicate which job submission process you are using (LSCS or ICRP). However, the use of LSCS will not block the Virtuoso ADE GUI and allow you to continue to work within ADE.

Shawn

Thanks for your reply. 

The best thing would be to contact customer support as it's really hard to debug such things in the community forums.

You might want to try changing your .cdsinit to this though:

unless(axlIsICRPProcess()
  load("/path/to/calibre/setup/code.il")
)

that means it will only load the Calibre customisation when not running in the ADE ICRP or LSCS netlisting process (where it would not be needed); that will eliminate the effect, I would expect.

Andrew

Hi I have exactly the same issue and the same symptoms.

The issue appeared to be related to pre-checks before netlisting (e.g missing variables)

There was indeed an existing cadence support note about that; adding some environement variable in the cdsinit appears to fix the issue. (Article 20257940 - Article (20257940) Title: ADE Assembler or ADE XL hangs at Validating step for a long time when running with extracted view)

Here are the recommended settings to try to fix the issue, not all of them are needed imho

envSetVal("adexl.test" "checkForNewCellviewVarsUponRun" 'cyclic "No")
envSetVal("adexl.test" "checkForUnsavedViewsUponRun" 'boolean nil)
envSetVal("adexl.gui" "disableConstraintsRead" 'boolean t)
envSetVal("maestro.test" "autoSyncMPC" 'boolean nil)
envSetVal("adexl.test" "autoCopyCellviewVars" 'boolean nil)
envSetVal("auCore.misc" "findVariablesSkip" 'cyclic "extracted")

I believe the key ones are  the following two since it implies to search for design variable inside the hierarchy. The article is pretty explicit about how difficult this task will be with postlayout netlist...

envSetVal("adexl.test" "checkForNewCellviewVarsUponRun" 'cyclic "No")

envSetVal("adexl.test" "autoCopyCellviewVars" 'boolean nil)

FB