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full path to the feature highlighted by mouseover

footangfootang
edited August 2012 in General
When you put the mouse over any feature in the layout, the type of feature (e.g. instance, polygon, box, etc.) and other parameters appear in the lower left corner of the window. A very useful piece of information is the leaf cell in which that feature appears, which is very helpful in figuring out hierarchy. Even more useful would be to show the entire path of that particular feature, and not just the leaf cell name, similar to how the "Browse Instances" or "Browse Shapes" feature works. It seems the full path information should be available as part of rendering any given feature on the screen. Is it possible to report the full path at the bottom of the screen?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Comments

  • MatthiasMatthias
    edited November -1

    Hi footang,

    Thank you for that suggestion. Actually I figured that the path might be pretty long, so it won't display in the limited space of the status bar.

    If you double click the item and choose "Instantiation" in the properties dialog you get the full path with some more details and functionality.

    Maybe that already solves your issue.

    Regards,

    Matthias

  • footangfootang
    edited November -1
    Thanks for your response, Matthias. Your suggestion indeed provides the information I want. Very nice! This is very useful in conjunction with the browse instances to figure out which instances have to change during hierarchy "split" when a unique change is needed based on surrounding layout.

    The status bar is very handy to avoid having to double-click and click "Instantiation". I agree that the status bar is likely too small to display the path, but I am most interested in the "deepest" part of the hierarchy, so truncating it would be acceptable. For example, ".../grandparent/parent/child", and just ignoring great-grandparent and above (replaced with "..."). Of course, depending on the size of the user's window (and length of cellnames), you may only be able to fit the child cellname.

    The "Instantiation" option is already extremely useful as is, so I am not complaining. Just a friendly suggestion if you think it will be useful to more people in general. Thanks for providing such a great visualization program. I am forced to use Cadence to do layout for compatibility reasons, but I always stream-out and view in KLayout because navigating "backwards" through hierarchy (child->grandparent) is impossible in Cadence. Also, changing patterns in the layer palette toolbox is much faster and the "Marked" style option is good for finding the proverial "needle in the haystack" (e.g. small XOR difference somewhere in a huge chip).
  • MatthiasMatthias
    edited November -1

    Hallo,

    Thank you for that nice feedback :-)

    I'll put the status bar request on top of my TODO stack as well, but it grows from day to day, so I can't tell when to deliver it.

    Best regards,

    Matthias

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