How to automatically store technology version on instance in schematics and layout?

Hi Sjoerd

I consider another approach: "Hacking the callback function of "Add Instace" form".

the original callback function of the "Add Instance form" can be retrieved by viewing the form property.

If we can hack the callback, add the our own script in (adding the PDK version in your case). It might be an work around.

For hacking the callback, see the post below. Sorry that I do not find a time to try it out.

Trigger for refreshing technology information

Hi, We are using incremental techfiles, for some technical reasons we can not use leSetLSW to set the order of the layers, so we have the problem that the layer order is not anymore the needed one. …

By Adrian Nistor over 9 years ago in Cadence Technology Forums > Custom IC SKILL

3 replies

Latest by dmay over 9 years ago

Best Regards

Yi

Hi Yi,

Very interesting solution to their problem, Never thought of "hijacking" a standard form.

I have tested it, but it doesn't work. It doesn't work with specifying a different _doneAction procedure. The problem is: the form for creating a new instance does not have an "OK" button, so the form is never "done". I haven't found an other entry in the form that gets triggered once an instance has been created (by clicking in the layout/schematics window). Just for reference, below the code I tested.

The code (the procedure spdkHiCreateInst) is working. When I do the lines below with the form still open, it is showing that the _doneAction is set to my custom callback.

This is identical to:

Although it is not working in this particular case,  I'll keep this solution, might be useful for some other problem.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

With kind regards,

Sjoerd

Hi Sjoerd

Sorry to see it fails again.

I also tried it out, and have the same results as you.

You may right about why such solution fails.

I made some experiments, the "finishEnterFun()" seems to serve the same functions as pressing "Esc" key while the form is called.

You may give a try to see whether "Done!" has been printed out with "Hacked callback" while pressing "Esc" to quite the "Add Instance" form

The actual procedure for adding the instance might be "_handleBindKey(...)", see the screen shot below.

Schematic editor always shows the corresponding API for the mouse button.

Things might go really complicated. By looking at the name of the API, this private function should sever a lot of purpose.

(Just tried the bindkey "Z" for zooming, it's the same API for LMB :(  )

We may need to find something else.

Best Regards

Yi

I wouldn't suggest any of this level of hacking. It's likely to end in tears (especially when something unexpected changes in our code because you're using private APIs or relying on altering the standard behaviour of the tools).

Unfortunately this isn't straightforward to solve, because you can't really distinguish between an old instance which never had the property (i.e. before it was added to the CDF) and a new device just created with create instance. One way to solve this is to determine if you're in a create instance command, which is what the approach below does - utilising getCallingFunction to look up the call stack to see if you are called within a create instance command from either layout or schematic. Hopefully this does what you want?

procedure(CCFinCreateInst()
    let(((level 0) (funcPat pcreCompile("^(sch|le)HiCreateInst$"))
        func found)
        while(!found && level<20
            func=getCallingFunction(level++)
            found=pcreExecute(funcPat func||"")
        )
        found
    )
)

procedure(myInitProc(cdf)
    when(CCFinCreateInst() && blankstrp(cdf->PDK_version->value)
        cdf->PDK_version->value="1.1"
    )
)

Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for this solution, it does exactly what I want.

Now I have only one more thing to get working too: when an instance is created using a script, by using the dbCreateParamInst(), I want to automatically store the PDK version as well. I tried to register a trigger like Yi suggested, but that doesn't work. There is not a valid trigger for creating an instance using the dbCreateParamInst() function.

What I have done now is adding a bit of code to the callback procedure that handles all parameter input. When after the creation of an instance the CCSinvokeInstCdfCallbacks() is called, it will look in the stack to see whether or not it was called from that procedure and then updates the PDK version parameter. This works, but if run on an old cellview, it will update the PDK version parameter on old instances as well. So far I haven't found a solution to get around this. What I think I need is a trigger after an instance is created.

With kind regards,

Sjoerd Herder

Sjoerd,

Unfortunately there is no trigger for dbCreateInst or dbCreate.* in fact. You have to call any relevant function yourself.

Regards,

Andrew