What is the fastest way to find all cells used in design hierarchy

Hi Alex,

I don't think there is a way to not have to evaluate the pcells, in other words descending into the sub masters. After all you might have instances of pcells that can be - depending on there parameters - hierarchical or not. How would you know that without descending into them. I'am not sure whether a non recursive approach (a so called breadth first search) would improve things a lot...quite honestly I don't think so.

Max

Hi mbracht,

Of cause I understand that there is no way to know what inside pCell without evaluating it. The thing is, I know there is nothing interesting inside pCells and I don't want to descend into pCells. As far as I understand pCells evaluation happens when I do instList=cv->instanceMasters

I just want to get a list of instances at the current level. So the question is, is it possible to get a list of instances in the cell without evaluenting pCells

Hi Alex,

Try to use Shift - T, or Edit - Hierarchy- Tree.

Best Regards,

Marben

Hi Alex,

Rather than going via the instanceMasters, it would be better to go via instHeaders:

cv~>instHeaders

For each instHeader you can get to ~>instances - which is a list of the instances of that type. You can also get to the ~>master this way (but that will trigger the evaluation/loading of the underlying cellView and PCell code if it's a PCell). You'll also notice that the same libName/cellName/viewName may appear more than once - that's because there is one instHeader for each variant, plus an instHeader for the superMaster (the superMaster won't have any instances because you can't directly instantiate it). There's also a ~>variants slot on the instHeader which will only be non-nil for the instHeader for a PCell superMaster, and that is a list of the instHeaders for each of the variants of the PCell.

Note that also going via cv~>instances will also not cause the sub-cellView/PCell to be loaded/evaluated unless you start looking at the ~>master of each instance - but that may be less efficient if you're trying to figure out the cells used - you don't really need to visit the same cellView multiple times if you're doing that (and presumably you're not concerned about the instances if you're already using instanceMasters).

There's also abNewLibraryRefs.il might be of use, in this post:  RE: How to get the list of cells used by a Config view by using SKILL?  but to be honest given that this doesn't know that it should stop at PCells, it will still evaluate any PCells in order to uncover any hierarchy within those PCells - so that's possibly not useful for you.

Andrew