Virtuoso Annotation

This post discusses briefly about annotation on schematics when simulation has been performed, it is not going to be a detailed summary but to get you started on annotation and ballons. Before going further, please make sure you know how to do a simulation prior to annotation configuration.

In ADE Explorere’s schematic view, go to Annotation setup by following the image shown below.

asaEditCompDisplay()
hiSetBindKey( "Schematics" "CtrlShift<Key>D" "asaEditCompDisplay()" )

In the Annotation Setup, there are a few things that you could config, my original goal was to setup DC operating points paramters¹, which I could not be able to find in the Annotation Setup.

It turns out that the previous setup window controls all cells, which shows in the “Annotation settings for:” section with the wildcard symbol *, thus to show parameters in annotation, for example region of DC Operating Points, you need to select Library and Cell to show the specific setup table. In this case, nmos1v instances annotation setup form is provided. From there you could select region to add the region annotation.

However, based on the info here, we could have at most 5 parameters to be annotated. Although you could add more rows with more parameters, you still could annotate the first 5 paramters with Label Parameter.cdsParam(). One good thing is that you could select additional parameters to be shown in balloons, or provide another set of annotations and then switch annotation with keybindings.

You could tune how the balloons look like when hovering on components, here is what it looks like for the balloons setup. I do recommend to modify on max height such that it could provide more info without scrolling, you could also modify the transparency settings. Anchored at cusor position fits my workflow well, otherwise those ballons would be shown at the corners of the schematics window than near the components, which could be helpful for other designers. I feel this is a bit distracted when the balloon does not show around the component.

The following shows both annotation and info balloon for a NMOS, where \(V_{gs}\) and \(V_{th}\) shown in info balloon but not in annotation.

https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/cic/posts/virtuosity-sharing-and-automatically-loading-ade-annotation-settings

One-Stop Knowledge Resource for Virtuoso ADE Explorer

1. What are the Operation Region of Transistors in Cadence [1, 2, 3 or 4][↩]