How to flatten Pcell in schematic

OK, there are a few points to make here:

1. There is nothing in hierarchical copy to "flatten" anything - neither layout nor schematic
2. There is nothing to handle pcells (layout or schematic) differently - maybe you were expecting to be able to convert them into "fixed" cells? rather than parameterised cells?
3. It can't change the library used for instances within a PCell, because the PCell SKILL code still runs, and so it will use whatever library that code is trying to generate (that's presumably why analogLib is being used here?)

It's not really that clear why you would want to do this, so maybe I've totally misunderstood what you are trying to achieve?

Regards,

Andrew

Hi, Andrew

1. The "flatten" what I mean is to merge multiple reference libraries into one standalone library, usually for backup schematic to fixed version.

3. I got it, but I try to copy the Pcell ( which is provided by fab's PDK )  to a standalone library, it does work. 

For example,

A schematic which has one Pcell res from fab's PDK named "AAA", and do copy hierarchical to another library named "backup".

As below, when I descend into the copied Pcell res, not only eval Pcell successfully but also changed the library name.

I cannot figure out how to do this.

Regards,

Morrris

Hi Morris,

OK, "flatten" normally means removal of hierarchy, but you weren't suggesting that - I understand what you meant now.

This is not going to be due to anything that copy is taking care of (in the foundry PDK situation where it appears to work). What's probably happening is that they've not hardcoded the library name when opening the symbol master to be instantiated, but instead doing something like:

master=dbOpenCellViewByType(pcCellView~>libName "primRes3" "symbol")
inst=dbCreateInst(pcCellView master x:y)

So that way the code is just looking for the component in the same library as the PCell. There's really nothing that copy could do to handle this for you - it would have to rewrite the SKILL code in the PCell to achieve this, which is not realistic (whilst it's theoretically possible for it to rewrite the top-level pcell code, if there are embedded functions that would soon become totally impractical; so this is not being done because it would have very limited effect).

Maybe you need to do something similar with your PCells? That may not be feasible if they are referencing PDK components, but perhaps you could have your PCell look first for the symbol in the same library as the schematic PCell, and failing that, fall back to the PDK? That said, I can't see a great deal of point in trying to copy stuff wholly into a backup library because almost certainly there still remain dependencies on the PDK library (there may be SKILL code needed which remains loaded by the original PDK).

Regards,

Andrew.