Cell Preferences for Abstract Generation

The Cell pane lists the cells contained in the selected bins and reports the status of those cells. You can use the Cells pane to perform sophisticated selection operations like the cell name, height, properties, and view status. When a cell library containing physical or logical information is imported into Abstract Generator, the view information about the cells is represented in the appropriate column of the Cell pane. Similarly, when a cell is processed through the various Abstract Generator steps – Pins, Extract, and Abstract – cellviews are created on successful completion of each step.

Abstract Generator uses the following 5.x library format cellviews:

layout for layout views
logical for logical views
abstract.pin for Pins views
abstract.ext for extracted views
abstract for abstract views

The Cell pane is divided into a number of columns, one for each of the views handled by Abstract Generator: Layout, Logical, Pins, Extract, and Abstract. A symbol in any of these columns indicates the presence of that view for the selected cell.

An additional column, Bin, appears as the first column when more than one bin is selected in the Bin pane. The Bin column displays the name of the bin to which the cell belongs.

The symbol displayed indicates the status of that view, as summarized in the following table.

Symbol	What It Represents
	A green tick indicates that the view is valid.
	An amber exclamation mark indicates that the view was generated with warnings.
	A red cross indicates that the view was generated with errors.
	A black question mark indicates that the view is present but was not created by Abstract Generator.

There is also a grayed-out version of each symbol, which indicates that the cellview in question has been rendered invalid, typically because of a change to one of the option settings or because of the regeneration of a predecessor view when an earlier step in the flow is re-run.

For example, a gray cross against a cell means that the view in question was originally generated with errors but has now been rendered invalid.

To maximize the usefulness of the feedback, cell status is not propagated from one view to another. For example, the pins view for a particular cell can show warnings against it, while the extract view for the same cell has none.

The Cells menu contains commands to perform the following tasks:

Virtuoso Abstract Generator User Guide
Product Version IC23.1, November 2023