Design Entry HDL_Library

 I am also new to Cadence and have been going through the same learning curve as you. It's difficult to jump straight to the best way to manage your parts libraries (or at least the best way that I've discovered). But here are the baby steps that I took to enlightenment, ymmv.

1) The first thing I did was to work through the tutorial that you can find in the program menu under start->cadence SBP->tutorial->Part Developer Tutorial. It takes you through the basics of how to create a simple part for which a footprint already exists.The output of this process will be a folder named after your part that contains several more folders like "chips", "entity" and "sym" that define the schematic symbol and operation of the pins. You still haven't made an entire part since the footprint was provided for you.You also don't know where to put it so that you can select it for a project. The simple option is your project's worklib folder but then you'd have to have a copy of every part you make in every project's worklib, the best answer is to use the Library Explorer to manage your libraries but I didn't jump to that just yet.

2) Next I needed to understand how to make a simple footprint. The problem is that there is no such thing as a "simple footprint". You will probably need to a) design/define a SMT pad or plated through hole for use with your part by making a padstack file (xxx.pad) then b) create a footprint (which consists of a .dra and .psm file), either by using the PCB Editor and selecting New->symbol or New->Symbol(using the Wizard). To help with this I found this website and this video http://vimeo.com/4060324 . Both were very helpful and you have to sort of triangulate between the two to get what you want.

You can't (or perhaps shouldn't) edit the actual libraries that cadence provides so you'll want to create a folder to hold your padstacks (the .pad you made) and one to hold your footprint files (the .psm and .dra) and you will need to tell the PCB Editor where you keep your footprint and padstack libraries by going to (in PCB Editor) a menu that I can't recall then find User Preferences, open up the Paths menu and under padpath, click to add another path then click the "..." botton and find the location of your pad folder. Do the same with the psmpath and tell it where your .psm and .dra are. There's another way to do it using a file in the pcbenv folder but I'm not there yet.

3) READ the Library Explorer Users Guide located in the docs section in folder libexp if I recall correctly. It's called libexp.pdf. Heck, I'll just attach it. It's only 30+ pages and extremely informative. I also read through the first 20 or 30 pages of the library management guide (allegrolibdev.pdf) and it was also informative. The Library Explorer is your friend. You use it to import "reference" libraries (the golden libraries you're using for designs) into a local development area called a build area. From here you can add a new part by launching the Part Developer or delete a part or create a whole new library then export the changes back to your reference libraries (but don't save your stuff in the Cadence provided libraries, okay?).

 4) I ended up downloading the Cadence Allegro Starter Libraries from here http://www.cadence.com/products/pcb/Pages/downloads.aspx and used them as a starting point for my own reference libraries. They use Part Table Files to store info on the parts in a standardized way across the libraries and also provide a spec for how they made their symbols and footprints. Read their specs, poke around their libraries to see where things are located and how they set them up.

Good luck, I hope this helps you and other fellow newbs! (if any experienced folks want to correct or add to what I've spewed, please feel free to do so.)

-Ed