Cannot find Direct Plot-> Main form option Cadence 6.1.3.1

Hi all,

I am trying to migrate to Cadence 6.1.3.1. I did some loop stability
analysis using Spectre's "stb" analysis. It prints out loop stability
summary at the end of simulation. But when I want to see the plots for
my loop gain and phase, I can not find an option for main form in the
direct plot of ADE-L. There are options for transient, AC, noise and
DC but no option for main form which are all grayed out if I have not
performed any of these analyses too. The documentation still talks
about using main form option to plot various things. I can plot data
by using ocean getData function. Even with other analyses, the main
form option is not there.

Has something changed or something wrong in my setup because of which
I am not able to see the Direct Plot -> Main form option in ADE-L. One
thing here is that I use the NCSU CDK and it seems that there is a
problem with checking out license for ADE-L so it uses ADE-XL licence
instead. Could that be an issue?

Thanks for all the help.

 

Vaibhav wrote, on 03/11/10 14:38:

Do you have a "menus" directory somewhere? Type "cdswhich -all menus" from the
directory you started virtuoso from. Maybe you have an obsolete
menus/spectre.menus (or similar) customisation file from an earlier release?

Regards,

Andrew.

 

Andrew

Thanks for information. I also think it has to be related to my config
or something with the NCSU kit. The NCSU kit for cdb version of the
cadence works fine. Here's what I could dig up:

For Cadence 6 when I do cdswhich -all menus, I get the folder : /apps/
oa_cds/local/menus

In that there are two files. Once ciw.menus and other simui.menus. The
simui.menus does not have Main Form option as I think it is for
spectre only. Here's the relevant part of the file

("Direct Plot"
(sevDirectPlotMenu session
'(
("Transient Signal" asiiPlotTranSignalCB tran)
("Transient Minus DC" asiiPlotTranSignalNoDcCB (tran
dc_op))
("Transient Sum" asiiPlotTranAddCB tran)
("Transient Difference" asiiPlotTranSubtractCB tran)
("AC Magnitude" asiiPlotACMagCB ac)
("AC dB10" asiiPlotACDb10CB ac)
("AC dB20" asiiPlotACDb20CB ac)
("AC Phase" asiiPlotACPhaseCB ac)
("AC Magnitude & Phase" asiiPlotACMagAndPhaseCB ac)
("AC Difference" asiiPlotBodeAnalysisCB ac)
("Equivalent Output Noise" asiiPlotEqOutputNoiseCB noise)
("Equivalent Input Noise" asiiPlotEqInputNoiseCB noise)
("Squared Output Noise" asiiPlotNoiseCB noise)
("Squared Input Noise" asiiPlotSquInputNoiseCB noise)
("Noise Figure" asiiPlotNoiseFigureCB (ac
noise))
("DC" asiiPlotDCCB dc)
))
)

the only file spectre.menus is at /apps/oa_cds/ic610/tools.lnx86/dfII/
etc/tools/menus/spectre.menus which has definition for the Main form
as :
("Direct &Plot"
(cons
(sevMenuItem "Main Fo&rm" ?form t
?callback `(sevDirectPlot ',session
'asiDirectPlotResultsMenuCB) )
(sevDirectPlotMenu session '(
("&Transient Signal" asiiPlotTranSignalCB tran)
("Transient Min&us DC" asiiPlotTranSignalNoDcCB (tran dc_op))
("Transient &Sum" asiiPlotTranAddCB tran)
("Transient Diff&erence" asiiPlotTranSubtractCB tran)
("AC &Magnitude" asiiPlotACMagCB ac)
("AC dB&10" asiiPlotACDb10CB ac)
("AC dB&20" asiiPlotACDb20CB ac)
("AC &Phase" asiiPlotACPhaseCB ac)
("&AC Magnitude & Phase" asiiPlotACMagAndPhaseCB ac)
("AC &Gain && Phase" asiiPlotBodeAnalysisCB ac)
("Equivalent &Output Noise" asiiPlotEqOutputNoiseCB noise)
("Equivalent &Input Noise" asiiPlotEqInputNoiseCB noise)
("S&quared Output Noise" asiiPlotNoiseCB noise)
("Squared Input &Noise" asiiPlotSquInputNoiseCB noise)
("Noise &Figure" asiiPlotSpectreNoiseFigureCB noise)
("&DC" asiiPlotDCCB dc)
))))

I double checked, my cadence 5141 with the compatible version of the
kit is setup the same way. There are no menus file in my home
directory or where I start Virtuoso from. So I don't understand why I
don't see it in ADE-L in Cadence 6. Any more pointers?

Regards.

 

Vaibhav wrote, on 03/11/10 18:09:

OK, that explains it. Because it is finding the "simui.menus" file in
/apps/oa_cds/local/menus that is defining at the top (I expect):

(sevSetMainWindowPulldownMenus
`(
"Session"
"Setup"
"Analyses"
"Variables"
"Outputs"
"Simulation"
"Results"
"Tools"
"Help"
))

If you compare that with the one in the installation, it will define the
pulldown menus as:

(sevSetMainWindowPulldownMenus
(let (menu)
menu = `(
"S&ession"
"Set&up"
"&Analyses"
"&Variables"
"&Outputs"
"&Simulation"
"&Results"
"&Tools"
"&Help"
)
when( envGetVal("adexl.launchFromTest" "showMenu")
menu = cons("&Launch" menu)
)
menu
)
)

The key difference is the & characters - this is the position of the accelerator
keys in the menus. Then what it is doing (in your case is looking for a menu
called "Results", not "&Results". It finds the one within the simui.menus file
(with no Direct Plot Main Form menu), and this does not get superseded by the
one in the installation spectre.menus file, because in that file, it's called
"&Results".

So you need to ensure that it is not picking up the menus directory from
/apps/oa_cds/... - this is breaking things.

Do "cdswhich setup.loc" and then look at the contents of the file. Is that
telling it to look in the /apps/oa_cds/local dir? Or is one of the env vars used
in the setup.loc file set to /apps/oa_cds/local - if so, can you unset it and
try that?

The setup.loc mechanism is documented in the <instDir>/doc/caiuser/caiuser.pdf
manual.

Regards,

Andrew.

 

Andrew

Thank you very much for the detailed info. I understood what you said
and went ahead and compared the file from the NCSU kit and original
file from Cadence and as you said the difference was the accelerator
keys. I modified the original file to include modifications from NCSU
and kept the file simui.menus is <path_start_cadence>/menus/. Now I
get my direct form option and some other too for which the function
names have changed in Cadence 6.

Thank you for your help!

Regards,

Vaibhav