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Find Navigator Saves the Day Again

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Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the masters of horrible user interfaces get you thinking that they've bent over backwards to outdo themselves. Consider: Never mind there's no such jumping through hoops needed in Cadence (the land of gorgeous Property Editor forms). If you q on a FET in S-Edit, you get a docked (I think that's the word) assistant (you remember that annoying Microsoft Office assistant that was "supposed" to help you? Now imagine something worse, but, at least, it's not animated). In this one, there's a button you can use to toggle "Display of visible properties only". Meaning, say, for a FET, if the schematic displays W, L and M, then, with this switch set on the Properties form, you'll only see (mostly) these three parameters for you to edit. Now, that's been the same about 10 years. But, you'd think something would at least be nicer, or, at least, work as it's supposed to in a brand new p...
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Don't Miss Out. Start Using the Find Navigator Today

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Probably the single best thing you can do to improve the quality of life. Sadly, the UI hasn't improved one iota since 2016 😢 Edit > Find. Then, Operate on the Selection (use the drop down). Else, your life is more complicated - you choose View and then tell it how to filter stuff out. For now, suppose we've selected a bunch of netlabels and want to change <*50>whatever to <*100>whatever (where in the world would you use something like this?) In the Script field : set string [property get -name Name -system] regsub -all {\*50} $string {\*100} string property set Name -system -value $string Now, how in the world are you supposed to know that? Search me. Any surprise that Cadence is the top EDA dog?
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Are You a Tanner Power User?

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Things you may wish to look into, to boost your productivity: The Find Navigator dtos and stod to moved between scientific and other notation CSHUNT is the equivalent of spectre's CMIN lvltim=3 and poweruplen might be convergence aids to try out
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You Want Your MOS FET's OP Info Summary. Now!

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With Cadence Virtuoso, If you use CTRL-ALT-1 after install the needful , you get the key pieces in your CIW. What can you do with Tanner (Now Siemens Custom IC)? Simple Get these: https://github.com/ananthchellappa/TannerTCL/blob/main/sed_helpers.tcl https://github.com/ananthchellappa/TannerTCL/blob/main/mos_op_summary.tcl https://github.com/ananthchellappa/TannerTCL/blob/main/summarize_opinfo_pretty.tcl And, ensure your setup loads: workspace menu -name {CUSTOM {Simulations} {OP Info Summary} }  -command {puts [mos_op_summary_for_selected]} workspace bindkeys -command {OP Info Summary} -key "Ctrl+Alt+1" That's it :)
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Dear Dr. Dev! Do I Really Need to Save All to Be Able to Cross Probe (No, but..)

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That's right - if you DON'T save all (pick the dropdown for true in the Spice options for saving voltages or currents) the cross-probing doesn't work out of the box. But, given how expensive saving all IS, what you can do is, copy the .tsub file from a run that DID save all to your just completed run before going to "View Waveforms" from T-Spice to launch the Waveform Viewer. Enjoy, and love to Kathy
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Favorite Bindkeys Not Working in Undocked Windows?

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That's one that hurt quite a bit - CTRL-E (return to top - because I wasn't sure ALT-E would make it - unlike with Cadence. Didn't know the Customize utility would allow me to set ALT-D to "Toggle dockable") and ALT-X working (go back to where you most recently jumped to top from). What worked?  Decide what your must-have bindkeys (need to work in this undocked window that you move to another monitor) and realize them use the "User 1" through "User 10" special functions.
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Setting Useful Highlight Styles with S-Edit for Schematics (and Simulation)

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Put these in your open.design folder under scripts. (Other useful stuff on GitHub ) One problem I was facing was that the nets whose voltages were plotted in the Waveform Viewer were ending up with the netlabels being shaded - and therefore difficult to read. To set the default colors that it cycles through: highlight -default {blue gold red brown pink yellow magenta lemon purple} And to ensure that the netlabels don't get shaded with the plot color: set custom_ic_highlight_manager_default_style \    {{user {net coloronly 0.0} {pin thick 3.0} {instance coloronly 0.0}} \    {simulation {net coloronly 0.0} {pin thick 3.0} {instance coloronly 0.0}} \    {sdl {net glow 1.0} {pin glow 3.0} {instance glow 1.0}}}
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