Insert a cell instance and then find it in the layout?

yanoff

I am trying to programmatically (in Python) fill an irregular shape with a rectangular array of cells . I create a CellInstArray and insert it into the parent cell. I then want to locate that instance and explode() it and delete some of its original elements if they are outside the boundary area. This basically works, but I have one challenge.

I can retrieve all the instances (of any kind) with cell.each_inst(). But I am having trouble getting the one specific instance I want. I thought I could loop through all the instances and compare their cell_inst to the original CellInstArray that I inserted. But the == comparison seems to not work sometimes.

Is there a better way to do this? I was hoping I could insert an instance and retain a pointer to it, so I can later perform some operation on it. But I cannot figure out how to do this through Python.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Brian

yanoff

The answer was starting me right in the face. The cell.insert() function returns the instance in addition to inserting it. So I can easily hold on to this reference.

Matthias

Exactly