Calibre
Calibre Advanced Topics DESIGNrev Scripting
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Course Overview
This course teaches students how to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market by creating custom Calibre DESIGNrev scripts and batch files that can be used to analyze and manipulate layout data. This course also teaches students how to extend the Calibre DESIGNrev GUI to obtain user input, display results from running DESIGNrev scripts, and add menus and menu items to invoke the scripts they write in class. The course presents a number of best practices and practical examples that demonstrate how DESIGNrev scripting can be leveraged to improve the chip design process. This course uses a task-based approach in which we present students with a series of common DESIGNrev coding tasks, then teach concepts and skills as needed to accomplish these tasks. Tasks have been suggested by Calibre field engineers based on user needs, and carefully selected to ensure that we teach the core concepts and skills needed to become proficient in the DESIGNrev coding environment. For this course, the term DESIGNrev refers to a family of tools:
- Calibre DESIGNrev
- Calibre WORKbench
- Calibre MDPview
- Calibre LITHOview
Hands-on lab exercises will reinforce lecture and discussion topics under the guidance of our industry expert instructors.
Prerequisites
- Familiarity with GDS or OASIS layout data
- Familiarity with IC Design in the Calibre environment
- Experience coding with Tcl/TK programming
PRIMARY COURSE TOPICS
You Will Learn How To
- Set up an INFO utility for querying high-level design data.
- Generate a high-level report to verify IP.
- Write a procedure that will display the hierarchy of the design.
- Swap cells.
- Rename cells.
- Merge a standard cell library into an existing design.
- Selectively update cell libraries.
- Save a portion of the open layout as a new layout.
- Report reference counts using the most efficient method for a given situation.
- Clean up designs that contain multiple copies of the same cell, each differing only in name.
- Extract net information stored as text or properties.
- Update the display to see layout modifications in the GUI.
- Write a script to modify the selected object.
- Add a menu item to the Macros menu.
- Build user prompts to collect data from the user before evaluating a script.
- Create a complete custom menu populated with commonly-used scripts.
- Run other Calibre tools from within a DRV script, then load the results.