load: can't access file - UartCorner.il, UartNetlist.il, and others

Hello,

I am not sure if this is a good place to ask this question, but I have
a strange configuration problem and it is beyond my abilities to
solve. I'm a grad student with limited support and one of few in my
lab using this tool. I had this error before when I first started
using Cadence, but it disappeared and I don't remember what
if anything I did that might have fixed it. Now it's happening again.

I'm running the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment to simulate a
schematic. Our design kit includes some extra Unicad stuff provided
by ST Micro, including a tool to manage corners. I access it by
choosing Tools->*Setup Corners from the ADE window, and then the
corner tool is supposed to pop up; I choose a corner, it saves the
model file for me, and then I can netlist and simulate.

Now as soon as I click 'Tools', I see this message:
*Error* load: can't access file - "UartCorner.il"
If I click on '*Setup Corners' I again see *Error* load: can't access
file - "UartCorner.il". Same thing if I choose 'Corners'. There are
other asterisked menu items that I assume are add-ons, all of which
producee similar errors, for example
*Setup User-defined Corners --> *Error* load: can't access file -
"UartCornerUser.il"
*Setup Simulation Levels --> *Error* load: can't access file -
"UartSimLevel.il"
and so on.

Also I just noticed a similar error occurs during netlisting: *Error*
load: can't access file - "UartNetlist.il".

It seems to me that the .il files are for some kind of user interface,
and some parameter is set wrong and they are not being found. I don't
know where the files live and more importantly I don't know how to
figure out what's misconfigured and how to fix it. Can anyone
suggest anything?
Thanks

 

That * in front of the Setup Corner menu is an indication that the
menu has been changed for the design kit. At least that is a
convention that I know of. I guess that Cadence support is using this
convention across most customers. This means that it is impossible to
know what is really going on in the background without further
knowledge. You could look into the CDS.log file in the directory where
you started the tool. There are sometimes more info there. Otherwise I
would suggest that you track down the responsible for the tool at your
site and ask him if you have the right setup. For some design kits,
you need to set environment variables for your unix environment
_before_ you start cadence. This is done very different from pdk to
pdk and only your support can tell you. One indication that you are
missing something is if you just went on and started cadence. Then you
have to look in your .cshrc or .login file to see if some environment
is set up. If your environment is plain and nothing is really set,
then that could be an indication that you need further setup.

Again, tracking down your local cadence guru is often the easies way.
In a university this may not be easy, though, but your professor
should know.

 

This is clearly a design kit issue. This means, your best source for information is whoever provides
you the design kit.

Just a guess, if you're not actually using ST design kit, but you happened to use it in the past,
it's not very friendly to cooperating with other design kits as it replaces default menus using
..menus files stored in the home directory.

To get rid of this and revert back to the default setup, you have to delete the menus directory that
it creates in your home.

Cheers,

Stéphane

 

Apparantly the problem was caused by accidentally initializing cadence
twice, once from within the home directory and once from the project
directory. Removing .cdsinit from the home directory appears to have
solved the problem. Thanks for your help.