Check for terminals display property

Himanshu,

This is a little bit complicated. Normally when symbol pins are created, they have an associated label object. If you select the pin shape itself, you'll see this by looking at car(geGetSelSet())~>children - and if you look at car(geGetSelSet())~>children~>objType you'll see they're labels. Label objects can then have the ~>isVisible attribute set to t or nil to control whether they are displayed - this is what you see in the second case.

If the label wasn't created (or was subsequently deleted), the first form appears. If the display is initially off, there may not even be an object to display the name or value, but what happens when  you first change the display to value, name or both, it creates a textDisplay object and attaches it to the pin figure (so car(geGetSelSet())~>children~>objType would show a textDisplay object). These textDisplay objects have a ~>isVisible attribute, but also a ~>isNameVisible and ~>isValueVisible attribute which allow you to control the name, value, both parts. Once the textDisplay is created, if you set the display off again, it keeps the textDisplay (it doesn't delete it).

So, to control this (if you want to fix it) you'd have to see if there's an existing attached label or textDisplay (labels are fixed, textDisplays are linked to a database attribute) and then control the display attributes appropriately. If there's no label or textDisplay you'd need to create one and attach it (by setting the ~>parent attribute of the new label or textDisplay). Note that when you create a textDisplay with dbCreateTextDisplay you have to say which object it is owned and associated with (this would be the terminal object, not the pin or the pin figure) and the name of the parameter that is displayed (which would be "name" in this case as it's the name of the terminal you want to display).

Hope that's not too complicated!

Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for all the explanation. And apologies for responding late.

I tried to query the terminal's children properties (by doing this : geGetSelSet()~>children~>??). Down this hierarchy there is "isVisible" attribute, from which I can track if the display is "on" or not.

However, I was wondering, is there a way to select an object (say a terminal itself) without opening the symbol gui? I am to test thousands of standard cells for this property check. Opening and closing each schematic would be a pain and clearly not a good idea. I tried using geSelectPoint, but it doesn't have an option as to which symbol to select the object from. I was hoping a command that would take the db pointer of the symbol as input.

Thanks,
Himanshu

Himanshu,

Assuming you've opened the cellView with cv=dbOpenCellViewByType(...) then:

foreach(term cv~>terminals
  printf("Terminal: %s\n" term~>name)
  foreach(pin term~>pins
    foreach(pinFig pin~>figs
      if(pinFig~>children then
        foreach(child pinFig~>children
          case(child~>objType
            ("label"
              printf("Attached object is a label - do label-specific changes here\n")
            )
            ("textDisplay"
              printf("Attached object is a textDisplay - do textDisplay-specific changes here\n")
            )
          )
       )
       else
         printf("No attached label/textDisplay\n")
       )
     )
   )
)

This is a bit of thrown together code just to iterate over all the pin figures and look at their attached objects - but hopefully this gives a clue where to start.

Regards,

Andrew.