Circular arrays in layout L

You'd need a short piece of SKILL code to do this easily (you could do it manually, but placing 36 instances would be a bit tricky). The first thing to be aware of is that instances can only be placed at 90 degree multiples (and a flip), but this can be worked around by using dbCreateXformPCell. Here's an example I quickly did. Firstly I created a layout called "metarray" with the structures I wanted to have arrayed:

Then I created a "layout_xform" view - the benefit is that when you instantiate this, you can specify a "mag" (magnification) and "angle" - it generates a PCell that flattens the contents and then changes the scale and orientation by an arbitrary angle (in degrees). I called this with the above layout open:

dbCreateXformPCell(geGetEditCellView() "mylib")

Then I used this SKILL code:

defMathConstants('CCFgenCircle)
procedure(CCFgenCircle(@key (cv geGetEditCellView()) (radius 20.0) 
    (step 10.0) lib cell 
    (view "layout_xform") (origin 0:0))
  let((master x y (angle 0.0) rads)
    master=dbOpenCellViewByType(lib cell view)
    while(angle<360
      rads=angle/180.0*CCFgenCircle.PI
      x=cos(rads)*radius+xCoord(origin)
      y=sin(rads)*radius+yCoord(origin)
      dbCreateParamInst(cv master "" x:y "R0" 1 
        list(list("angle" "float" angle)))
      angle+=step
    )
  )
)

With a new layout open (mylib/circarray/layout) I then ran in the CIW (with the circarray window the current window):

CCFgenCircle(?lib "mylib" ?cell "metarray")

This uses the default origin (0:0), radius (20) and step (10), but you could call CCFgenCircle(?lib "play45" ?cell "metarray" ?radius 30.0 ?step 20) if you wanted something different.

The result of the above is:

Regards,

Andrew