Accessing child instances of schematic instances in Virtuoso

Well once you have the instance returned by dbFindAnyInstByName(..) you can get at its master cell using the master attribute

masterCv = dbFindAnyInstByName((geGetWindowCellView),<instName>)~>master

So now you can use again the '~>' operator to get at all cellView aatributes (and user defined properties) in tehy master cell, for example masterCv~>instances

Thanks for the reply.

I did try that but the instances attribute is nil despite the instance containing a number of sub-instances.

It seems to be accessing the instance symbol rather than the symbol itself as the master contains the following info:

cell dd:0x225900f8 cellViewType "schematicSymbol" cellType "none"

oops - I missed that this is a schematic. Well then you need to go like this:

symbolMaster = dbFindAnyInstByName((geGetWindowCellView),<instName>)~>master
schMaster = dbOpenCellViewByType(symbolMaster~>libName symbolMaster~>cellName <schematicViewName>)

...which in turn raises the question how do you get at the name of the corresponding schematic. Well it depends, if you have a config view defined you need to get the information from there, if not the view list (which you can see in the Editor Options) is available in a SKILL variable by the name of viewNameList:

(envGetVal "schematic" "viewNameList" )

Max

A few additions to what Max said.

• The viewNameList env var is just what the schematic editor uses by default when you descend edit (unless a config is used), but what is most suitable as your switch list will depend on the application (each netlister typically has its own switch view list, for example).
• You may also find dbGetAnyInstSwitchMaster useful to find the view to switch into
• If you need to traverse using a config (which is reasonably complicated, to be honest), you may find <ICinstDir>/tools/hdb/examples/hdbTraverse.il a useful starting point

Regards,

Andrew

Ah right, thanks for the solution!