Encounter/Nanoroute - fixing DRC violations while keeping critical pre-routes untouched

 Hi,

Check the docs for editChangeStatus. I think this may do what you want.

- Kari 

First off, welcome to the forums, and thanks for the question!

There may be a command that does that I'm not thinking of right off, but even if there is, scenarios like this are good opportunities to talk about various ways to approach problems within Encounter.

The first thing that came to mind when I read your question was dbGet and dbSet.  If you're using version 7.1 or newer of the software, you could use dbSet to do this as follows. I'll show an example operating on a 32 bit bus:

First, select the nets using "selectNet":
encounter> deslectAll
encounter> selectNet DTMF_INST/TDSP_CORE_INST/alu_result*

Next, use dbGet to query the nets:
encounter> dbGet selected.?
net: allTerms box isClock isExternal isFixedBump isGnd isPatternTrunk isPhysOnly isPwrOrGnd isScanNet name numInputTerms numOutputTerms numTerms objType props sVias sWires wires

This is telling us that all of the objects currently selected are "net" objects, and "net" objects have all of these associated objects and attributes.  "wires" looks interesting, so we can use dbGet to "walk" the database from nets to wires:

encounter> dbGet $selected.wires
0x1cca8f70 0x1d5d0768 0x1d5d0744 0x1d5d0720
<snipped>

You should see a db pointer echoed to the screen for each wire segment of all the nets you selected. We can again query what attributes wires have with ".?":

encounter> dbGet $seleted.wires.?
wire: beginExt endExt layer objType pts status via viaPt width

"status" sounds helpful, so we can query the status of all the wires with:

encounter> dbGet $selected.wires.status
routed routed routed routed

In your case, it sounds like you'd like to convert "routed" wires to "fixed".  We can do dbSet to do that, but what if you don't know what the tool calls the fixed status?  ie, "FIXED" or "Fixed" or "fixed"?  You can query which enumerated values are valid for the status field:

encounter> dbGet selected.wires.?h status
status(settable): enum(cover fixed noshield routed unknown), Wiring status (equivalent to DEF NETS regular wiring status)

From this we can see that the attribute is settable and that "fixed" is the string used for the "don't move me" status we're looking for.  Now, we can use dbSet as follows:

First, we'll get the pointers we want to operate on, the wires:

encounter> dbGet selected.wires
0x1cca8f70 0x1d5d0768 0x1d5d0744 0x1d5d0720

Next, we'll set the "status" attribute to "fixed" with dbSet:

encounter> dbSet [dbGet selected.wires].status fixed

Query success with:

encounter> dbGet selected.wires.status
fixed fixed fixed fixed

When you defOut these attributes should be retained.

If you're using a version earlier than 7.1, there is a script in the "gifts" directory that could help with this.  The gifts directory resides here:

<install_path>/share/fe/gift/scripts/tcl/

There is a script called "userSetSelWireStatus.tcl" which would do the same:

encounter> source userSetSelWireStatus.tcl
encoutner> selectNet *
encounter> userSetSelWireStatus Fixed

There is also an FE-TCL command called "dbSetNetWireStatus" that would be helpful if dbGet isn't available to you.  It is an older style of TCL scripting that is a little more difficult to use than dbGet but certaintly has been useful for many years:

dbSetNetWireStatus <netPtr> <status>

Between these solutions I hope you find one of them meets your needs.

Thanks,
Bob

Kari's suggestion is absolutely right.  That's the easiest way to this.  Important to note that the nets need to be selected with "editSelect -nets <net_name_search_string>" and *not* selectNet in order for editChangeStatus to work.

Thanks for that, Kari!

 THanks alot for the help!