I’ve been using ADE-XL to run corner simulations lately. I like that it lets me set up a specification for simulations (AKA a scoreboard) and then runs through different corners. And it supports distributed or parallel computing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But getting things like corner definitions in there is difficult. You’d have to hand-enter them. Luckily, Cadence allows you to load these definitions from a CSV file or an XML format they call SDB.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The CSV file is pretty useless. The reason is that each corner entry is another column<\/em> in the file, not another row. This is the transpose of the way everyone else does CSV files\u2014where a row is another record, and the columns are the fields in that record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, with some use of Python’s etree XML capabilities, you can get the SDB file to work pretty easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Here’s a sample script that takes a sample SDB file (which you can export from ADE-XL) and then adds multiple corners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first section makes all the different corner combinations of process, voltage and temperature. As a small tangent, I also constructed all the process corners themselves (slow\/fast NMOS, slow\/fast PMOS, etc).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been using ADE-XL to run corner simulations lately. I like that it lets me set up a specification for simulations (AKA a scoreboard) and then runs through different corners. And it supports distributed or parallel computing. But getting things like corner definitions in there is difficult. You’d have to hand-enter them. Luckily, Cadence allows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[177,180,33,178,181,179],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analog-pro","tag-ade-xl","tag-automation","tag-cadence","tag-python","tag-regression","tag-scripting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/poCEy-g7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/1252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET\nimport itertools\nimport os.path\n\ntree = ET.parse('adexl-sample-corners.sdb')\nroot = tree.getroot()\ncorners = root.find('active').find('corners')\n\nvdds = [3.0, 3.3, 3.5]\ntemps = [-40, 25, 85]\n\nmodel_comb = itertools.product(['slowNMOS', 'fastNMOS'], ['slowPMOS', 'fastPMOS'], ['lowResistor', 'highResistor'])\n\nmodel_corners = [''.join(k) for k in model_comb]\nall_combs_keys = ['modelsection:\/path\/to\/modelfile.scs', 'var:VDD', 'var:temperature']\nall_combs = itertools.product(model_corners, vdds, temps)\ncorner_list = [ dict( (all_combs_keys[i], v) for i,v in enumerate(c) ) for c in all_combs ]\n\nfor i,corner in enumerate(corner_list):\n if 'corner name' in corner:\n c_name = c['corner name']\n else:\n c_name = 'C{0}'.format(i)\n c = ET.SubElement(corners, 'corner', enabled=\"1\")\n c.text = c_name\n print(c.text)\n\nfor k,v in corner.iteritems():\n if k.startswith('modelsection'):\n modelfile = k.split(':')[1]\n models = c.find('models')\n if not models:\n models = ET.SubElement(c, 'models')\n mm = ET.SubElement(models, 'model', enabled=\"1\")\n mm.text = os.path.split(modelfile)[-1]\n mt = ET.SubElement(mm, 'modeltest')\n mt.text = 'All'\n mb = ET.SubElement(mm, 'modelblock')\n mb.text = 'Global'\n mf = ET.SubElement(mm, 'modelfile')\n mf.text = modelfile\n ms = ET.SubElement(mm, 'modelsection')\n ms.text = v\n if k.startswith('var'):\n var_name = k.split(':')[1]\n vars = c.find('vars')\n if not vars:\n vars = ET.SubElement(c, 'vars')\n var = ET.SubElement(vars, 'var')\n var.text = var_name\n val = ET.SubElement(var, 'value')\n val.text = str(v)\n\ntree.write('generated.sdb')<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n