Clarity – Tip of the week: Setting Up Area Ports in Clarity 3D Layout

Area ports are normally used to define power ports in the regions of a design where the power and ground pins are located. You can define the area ports as Horizontal lumped gap ports.

Horizontal lumped gap ports are defined between the positive node (power pin) and the nearest negative node (ground pin). If the two nodes cannot be found to create the port, an error message is generated.

To generate area ports, you need to define the following:

• Area definition
• Grid setup
• Port layer
• Port type
• Positive and negative nets associated with the ports
• Node distance (applicable only for lumped gap ports)

Following is a simple DIMM card with multiple DRAMs and a controller:

The steps to generate the area ports:

1. Select Area Port from the Setup menu.
2. Draw a rectangle on the location where you want to define the area ports.
3. Click the Get Pos Net From View button and click inside the rectangle to define the positive net of the area port. Similarly, click the Get Neg Net From View button and click inside the rectangle to define the negative net of the area port.      

1. Double-click Lumped Port next to Port Type and select the type of the port from the dropdown list.
2. Double-click the value next to Node Distance and specify the distance between the positive nodes.
3. Click Generate Ports to generate the area port. The area ports are generated as shown below:

To see the steps, click here and watch the video.

Team SimTech

Cadence Design Systems