Find Navigator Saves the Day Again

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 process we plan to start designing in. Think again. Couldn't be worse - the "Display visible only" hides all parameters, so, you have to weed through a hundred lines to get to W and WF and NF. God.

Luckily, when I ask if they've already reported it, Viswa says that, once you edit a parameter, then, if you use the switch that says "Do not show inherited parameters', then the displayed properties are manageable - you might have to look at a bit of mumbo jumbo, but productivity is massively restored.

All true. Except, knowing me, is there a fast track to getting to this one?

Can you maintain an "all_devices" schematic where you put down all the devices of interest (say FETS only, to start with) and edit the parameters you care about, and then, can you just copy and paste from this "palette"? Thankfully, yes.

The fastest track - yes, you should be able to get all cells with names matching a string and then instantiate them using TCL commands. But, since there are only 14 FETs, we'll put them down manually. And then?

Enter the Find dragon. I ask chatGPT:

Need a TCL code snippet.

for each of m, nf, l, wt and wf

give me a line like:

property set l -value [property get l] -docallback

(after I verified that a cheesy get/set is the same as "edit it once" (thank God))

I get:

property set m  -value [property get m]  -docallback

property set nf -value [property get nf] -docallback

property set l  -value [property get l]  -docallback

property set wt -value [property get wt] -docallback

property set wf -value [property get wf] -docallback

And, that's all you need to put in the modify script portion of the Find Navigator. And I'm all set. Phew:)