Edit Soft Blocks

The Edit Soft Blocks command lets you modify the soft blocks in your design. Use the Floorplan – Soft Block Update – Edit Soft Blocks command to modify the attributes of individual soft blocks to take account of placement and connectivity requirements in your design. You can also access this command from Edit – Edit Soft Blocks. This command is recommended if you want to make changes that do not require the physical hierarchy to be regenerated.

Load Physical View

The Load Physical View command is used to import the predefined information from a source physical cellview into a current cellview. To do this, select Floorplan – Load Physical View. You can also access this command from File – Load Physical View.

Create Soft Pins

The FloorPlan – Connectivity – Create Soft Pins command lets you create, delete, and update soft pins for your soft blocks. You can also access this command from Create – Soft Pins.

After the physical hierarchy is configured, if you need to improve the connectivity of your design, you can create additional soft pins on your soft blocks.

Snap Pins Form

The Snap Pins command is used to snap both top-level and level-1 pins to the grid appropriate to the block type. To snap all soft block pins, select Floorplan – Connectivity –  Snap Pins. You can also access this command from Connectivity – Pins – Snap Pins. At advanced nodes, this command provides additional options to snap pins to WSP grids.

Analyze

The Analyze command generates information about connectivity and other useful design information. It is useful to find out the connectivity (the number of connections) of a block with other blocks, so that during manual floorplanning, you can keep the blocks that have more connectivity between them closer to each other.

See Analyzing Connectivity in a Floorplan.

Create Feedthrough Terminal Pins

The Create – Feedthrough Terminal Pins command is used to create additional feedthrough pins in order to improve the connectivity of your design.

Creating Boundary Pins on Selected Shapes

The command is used to create boundary pins on selected shapes. You need to select the shapes and run the API to create all boundary pins automatically, in one go. You specify the distance from the PR boundary at which pins need to be created on the selected shapes. This distance will impact the size of pin created. If the selected shapes are not associated with nets, only the boundary shapes are generated; no corresponding pin object is created.

SKILL API: vfpCreateBoundaryPinsForSelectedShapes

Level-1 Editing

The Level-1 Editing command allows you to edit the soft block without descending to hierarchy and also allows to edit soft blocks by looking at adjacent blocks. The commands used to do Level-1 Editing are as follows.

• Move
• Stretch
• Reshape
• Chop

Pin Connectivity Setting

The Pin Connectivity Setting command allows you to create, change, and delete strong and weak pins, and create must-connect pins. You can change a weak pin to a strong pin or vice-versa, or create must connect groups. To do this, select Connectivity – Pins – Pin Connectivity Setting command.

Set Cell Type

The Set Cell Type command provides various features to search and set cell type for multiple cells. To set the cell type of blocks, click Tools – Set Cell Type in the CIW.

See Setting the Cell Type.

Pin Alignment

The Pin Alignment command allows you to align pins between blocks to get the shortest net length. The pin aligner is connectivity based and no specific pin selection is required, thereby, allowing multiple selection. The pin aligner aligns a list of target pins with respect to the position of a list of reference pins. Reference pins are the pins whose positions are used as the reference for alignment.

Reference pins can belong either to a block or to the top-level design. The block may be a soft block or a hard block because the pins of the reference block are not moved. Target pins are the pins that are moved by the alignment command. The target pins can either belong to a soft block or to the top-level design.

See Aligning Pins.