pin name vs terminal name of a pin

You can match Pin Name to Terminal Name only if you have one pin of this name.

Like an instance, you cannot have two I0 , that why it is usually auto incremented with I1 I2 I3.

Try to copy two pins with PinName==P__48, it will raise an error or a warning.

*WARNING* (DB-270000): dbSetPinName: Pin with name 'P__0' already exists.

Consider it to be like a schematic css()~>baseName , or "Instance Name" in the Property editor

Regards,

The pin name is the name of the internal pin object.
A terminal can have multiple pin objects (via the pins property), and from the database structure, a pin could hold multiple shapes that are associated with the pin, although the usual case is that there is one pin object for each physical pin shape (what is usually referred as "pin").
The property editor is showing the merged information from the terminal object and the pin object of the selected pin shape, so from user point of view these three are rather indistinguishable.

However, the name of the pin has no function, it just has to be an unique identifier, so you could e.g. extend the terminal name by some additional numbering when there are more than one pin object on a terminal; I use sprintf(nil "%s_%d" terminal~>name i) as pattern (incrementing i over the pins of the terminal, any other scheme would also work). This provides much more clarity than the default names in the listing of the property editor.

You could set the names manually, though I guess, a small script to do this all at once is quite straightforward and much more convenient...

Regards.

As has been pointed out before, the pin name is not really used for much other than as an identifier. There's one case when handling abutment of devices where keeping the pin name of the abutting pin before and after abutment (i.e. as the PCell re-evaluates with the new parameters) is needed for the abutment system to keep track of the pins. Other than that, it's just a reference.

henker said:

a pin could hold multiple shapes that are associated with the pin, although the usual case is that there is one pin object for each physical pin shape

Note that the scenario when multiple figures are on the same pin is definitely used, as this is how you indicate that the "pins" are strongly connected. A connection to any one of the shapes on the pin means the connection is made, and you can through-connect to the others. Another scenario is where you have multiple pin objects on the same terminal - these are then weakly connected (e.g. the pin at the top and bottom of a gate on a MOS device).

Andrew

Thank you very much all ebecheto, henker, Andrew! 

All your explanations helped me understand about pin better. :)