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Introduction to Concurrent Layout Editing
Virtuoso® Concurrent Layout (CLE with E for editing) is a layout editing environment that enables designers to work concurrently on the same cellview within Virtuoso. This helps them in parallelizing their efforts, and, in turn, increases the productivity of the layout design team. You can perform concurrent editing in Layout XL and Layout EXL.
Licensing Requirements
Concurrent layout functionality requires either:
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Virtuoso_Layout_Suite_XLlicense combined with 4 GXL flexible license tokens -
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Virtuoso_Layout_Suite_EXLlicense -
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Virtuoso_Layout_Suite_MXLlicense
The license is held until the last layout window is closed.
If you switch from Layout XL to Layout EXL or Layout MXL, the GXL tokens remain checked out. To prevent this, first close Layout XL and then open Layout EXL or Layout MXL.
For information on licensing in the Virtuoso Studio, see Virtuoso Software Licensing and Configuration User Guide.
Benefits of Using Concurrent Layout
Some of the top benefits of using Concurrent Layout are the following:
- Boosts layout productivity by enabling several designers to work concurrently on the same cellview. Typical examples are DRC fixing, chip finishing, and critical nets manual routing.
- Saves the design partition view containing only the updated part of the design, which is quite small in comparison to the initial cellview. This reduces the disk access time. In the design management environment, this saves vault storage space and reduces the network traffic to improve the network responsiveness.
- Enables the design manager to review a partition view and merge or reject it. The user can generate several results for what-if analysis and picks the best combination in the end.
- Supports off-line concurrent editing because the client/server model can suffer synchronization bottleneck over the network.
- Provides Incremental Edit In Place to complement the traditional hierarchical design by postponing an update in the sub-hierarchy until it is verified in all the designs referencing it.
Limitations of Concurrent Layout
Listed below are some tasks that are currently not supported in Concurrent Layout:
- Constraint editing. For example, you cannot edit MODGENs in Concurrent Layout.
- Editing an object created in an imported peer partition. Edits made to such objects are not saved. You can only concurrently edit an object existing in the top design.
When a limitation is detected, Concurrent Layout displays an alert glyph on the canvas and an Edit Loss error in the Alerts section of the Concurrent Layout assistant. You will be asked to undo the changes because saving them can result in a partially saved design, where the unsupported changes will be lost.
In case of constraint editing, if you proceed with saving the design, Concurrent Layout may create a marker to record the incident and inform the design manager that an unsupported edit was not undone by the designer before save.
You might see other kinds of alerts, such as edit conflicts that can result in merge issues. For example, a complex object, such as an MPP being edited in two design partitions can cause edit conflicts. Such issues can be avoided by carefully creating the design partitions and are not considered a limitation.
Related Topics
Terms Used in Concurrent Layout Editing
Accessing the Concurrent Layout Assistant
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