create DSPF/SPICE cellView using SKILL

It is documented on the description of dbOpenCellViewByType, esp. fourth and fifth argument (viewType and mode), though maybe not that clear on first sight. So you may follow this article first and look at the documentation afterwards, than it gets much clearer:

support.cadence.com/.../ArticleAttachmentPortal

The easiest way by far is to use the cdsTextTo5x UNIX program to import the dspf and create the shadow (netlist.oa) database:

cdsTextTo5x -lib mylib -cell newcell -view dspf -lang dspf newcell.dspf

The only public interface (I think) to generate the shadow database within Virtuoso is:

cv=ddGetObj("mylib" "newcell" "dspf")
teSaveWithDerivedData(cv)

However, this only works if you have the view open in the graphical text editor.

Following on from the suggestion above, you can also use this code to create textual views: How to create a text cellview using SKILL. However, that also doesn't help with generating the shadow database (the shadow database primarily contains info about the I/O of the cell for netlisting to succeed). The CDF also would need generating too.

Andrew 

Henker, thanks for the replay. Yes - I'm aware about dbOpenCellViewByType and "netlist" type as a fourth parameter - but this just creates dummy netlist.oa file without any information. And I don't see any possibilities how to add information about I/O pins.

Andrew, thanks for the advice!

Yes — teSaveWithDerivedData works only in interactive mode and does not support batch mode.

Regarding cdsTextTo5x — I tried it some time ago, but it didn’t work for me: no views were generated, and no errors were reported. However, today, after multiple attempts, I discovered that if the -cell option is specified, it must match the name of the subckt in the netlist — otherwise, nothing will be generated and no error will be shown.

If the -cell option is omitted, then the cell name will default to the name of the subckt in the netlist.

So yes — I confirm that cdsTextTo5x is a working solution for generating a proper cellView from DSPF and SPICE in batch mode.

Thanks!

Ah, sorry, I misread and assumed that view creation was the problem.

The public API behind the 'Build a database ...' button is hdlGenerateTextDatabase (available since IC6.1.7 ISR15). This creates the shadow database for analog and digital languages without requiring the text editor. It also creates the termOrder entry in the CDF simInfo and the property nlAction=stop, which are needed to have the netlist file of the view included in simulation.

You can actually locate this by checking your CDS.log:
After pressing the 'Build a database ...' button, you get an entry with "_teSaveAndExtract()" from the private text editor API (the naming is rather obvious). With that as starting point in the support, you'd get hits for hdlGenerateTextDatabase.

Thanks henker . I'd missed the fact that a public API had been added (previously there was a private function to do this. My mistake...

Andrew