Planning and Optimizing Pins Using the Pin Tool

You can access the Pin Planner and Pin Optimizer from the Pin Tool.

Choose Place – Pin Placement to display the Pin Planner tab of the Pin Placement form. Use the options on this tab to assign or refine pin constraints, such as the side constraint (Left, Right, Top, Bottom), placement status (Fixed, Locked), and pin order.
You can then use the Pin Browser in the Pin Tool to refine the pin attributes, such as pin layer and size.
Choose Place – Pin Optimization to display the Pin Optimization tab of the Pin Placement form. Run Pin Optimizer to position pins of blocks in a manner that helps obtain the shortest possible net length at a particular level in the design.
(Virtuoso Layout Suite EXL) Choose Place – Optimize All Pins to optimize pins. You can run the command in the following modes:
- Top Down: Runs pin optimizer on the top-level first, followed by the lower levels. Top-level pins are optimized with respect to level-1 pins, level-1 pins are optimized with respect to level-2 pins, and so on.
- Bottom Up: Runs pin optimizer on the bottom-most level first, followed by the higher levels.