Installing Cadence on Sun Solaris 9

My job is to install Cadence in a university lab so that E.E. undergrads can
get hands-on experience to prepare them for working in the industry. I'm a
computer person, not an E.E.

My experience with this project so far is that the documentation is very
confusing and flat-out wrong in some cases.

I would really appreciate some conceptual and practical answers to help get
this running. Thank you!

1. InstallScape asks for an Installation directory, so I pointed it to:
/etc/cadence and installed the Base for IC11241. That seemed to work.

Then I tried to repeat the process for Assura and it wouldn't let me use the
same directory because of duplicate filenames with the module already
installed.

What is the correct file hierarchy to install the various Cadence pieces? I
realize you can't give a detailed answer, but a conceptual answer would be
most helpful.

2. Is there a main Cadence application that is used to load whatever design
tool the engineer needs at the time, or is each design tool a stand-alone
program?

3. Nowhere in the install docs have I found where it says how to run
Cadence. What program or script runs Cadence? (Or each design tool,
depending on the answer to question 2.)

I really appreciate any and all help you can lend.

Thank you!

 

Ekne, thanks for the rapid reply--I really appreciate your help!!

Yes, it really helps to know the infrastructure. That small piece of info is
a huge help. As for, "The Cadence Installation Guide," before I can even
read it I need to have CDSDOC running.

I have several Cadence apps downloaded & installed via InstallScape.
Following the instructions below right out of the CDSDOC User's Guide, I
can't get CDSDOC to run. When I do what it says, I get, "cdsdoc: not found",
even though it is clearly there when I list the directory contents.
Isn't there a simple HTML or PDF version of the Installation Guide?

-------------
On a UNIX workstation

1 Open a shell window.

2 Within your Cadence software installation, change to the

tools/bin directory by entering:

cd <release>/tools/bin

cdsdoc &

The documentation library window opens.

---------------------

Thanks again for your assistance, Ekne!!

Best regards,

John

============

 

Hi Ekne,

I spoke to Cadence tech support and he helped me get the docs up and
running. It turned out, all I was lacking was a symbolic soft link that
mapped <product>/tools.sun4v to <product>/tools.

ln -s /etc/cadence/ICC11241/tools.sun4v tools

This morning he told me how to get to all the docs from SourceLink. I had a
SourceLink account, but I had never seen the link in there (probably cause
the old version of Netscape Solaris 9 uses displays fonts really tiny on
this big Sun monitor and the commands to change text size are grayed out). I
am totally spoiled with FireFox and Linux. LOL

Now I have access to the docs, I'm a bit disappointed that the Cadence
Installation Guide is written around Softload, so for us, most of it is
irrelevant.

Thanks again for replying, Ekne! I think most of the users in ths forum are
E.E.'s busy with their design work, and probably never had to install
Cadence themselves. I wasn't sure if I would get any response here, but I
was desperate for help.

I will share the solutions as I get them, for others to read going through a
similar experience.

Best regards,

John

------------------

 

Why are you installing into /etc? Even Sun recomend to install 3rd party
software into /opt hierarchy.

Install into separate directories in /opt

My opinion of "correct" is:
Cadence version 5.2.51 in
/opt/cds_5.2.51

Aptivia 4.1.5 in
/opt/aptivia_4.1.5

and so on.

icfb, icms, look at the comptut.pdf to get an impression. (Make a homepage
for the course and link the comptut.pdf there)

Loading of external tools controlled from the .cdsinit file

To overcome this go to http://modules.sourceforge.net/ and install modules.
If you do the configuration of modules properly, all you need to say to the
students is:
module display cadence
and they will get information provided by you on how to run the system, and
the environment variables will be set properly, and you can make sure that
they load the correct version.
Believe me, if you do EDA CAD you will have to manage many revisions of many
different tools.

But get them out of /etc