Have you ever found yourself in situations where you’re not sure which values of design variables or parameters could give you the desired simulation results? Or, have you come across situations that required you to calculate the performance of a given design over a collection of design or parameter values?
I’m sure most of us would have encountered these problems several times while working with analog designs, no matter whether the design is small or a large one!
To keep pace with the current technology and to fulfill such ever-increasing simulation requirements, Virtuoso ADE Explorer has introduced a very powerful and handy feature called Real Time Tuning (RTT) assistant. As the name suggests, the RTT assistant helps you dynamically fine-tune the design, and updates made to the design are instantaneously reflected in the generated simulation results.
The RTT flow is tightly integrated with the Spectre simulator. You need to run the simulation only once (at the start) and Spectre remains active in listening mode waiting for new variables or parameter values.
Real Time Tuning Graphical User Interface
When you invoke the RTT assistant, the schematic design window appears with this assistant displayed on the left – technically, you are in RTT mode now!
Have a look at the figure below to catch a glimpse of the RTT assistant.
It’s absolutely time-saving and easy to view the simulation results and waveforms as soon as you change the design and parameter values by moving sliders in the RTT assistant.
Tuning and Beyond...
After you change the values, the updated calculations are displayed in the Outputs Setup tab and output waveforms are displayed in the Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL graph window, which can also be opened as an assistant in the Virtuoso ADE Explorer or design window, further solidifying the integration between ViVA XL and ADE. Just change the values in RTT and view the results alongside in the same ADE Explorer window! This can be extremely helpful when you are trying to overcome the initial hiccups with simulating a complex design!
Also, it's interesting to note that you can view the updated waveforms directly on the schematic design in the form of waveform info-balloons or thumbnails. See the figure below to view how updated values are displayed in the trace legend of the info-balloon. After you're done with design tuning, you can bring the updated values back into the original ADE Explorer setup.
If you haven’t tried RTT assistant as yet, I’d recommend you to try it now! It’s among the most interesting and useful features of ADE Explorer, which works fantastically!
For more information about how to tune the designs using RTT assistant, you can view the Real Time Tuning in Virtuoso ADE Explorer video on Cadence Online Support.
Click the video link now or visit Cadence Online Support and search for the video under VideoLibrary.
Note: If you don’t have a Cadence Online Support account, you can play this video (mp4) natively in Cadence Help when you are using Virtuoso IC6.1.7/ ICADV12.3 (ISR3 or later). In the Cadence Help Virtuoso Documentation Library, look for the video title under Video Demos.
Related Resources
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Ashu Vashishtha