Hi Matthias,
Would it be easy and feasible over time to add a new "path" drawing function which draws several paths in parallel at once, with parameters being the number of paths in parallel, the width of the parallel paths and the space in between the parallel paths? An extra parameter could be shortening the parallel paths each x um. Some technologies have a tough constraint on maximum width forcing one to draw high-current paths as parallel paths.
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Cheers,
Tomas
Comments
Even better, it's already there: you can create a PCell for this.
Here is a first version - without the shorting yet. It will plug itself into the Basic Library. You can draw a wide path and turn it into a "Basic.SPLIT_PATH" PCell using "Edit/Selection/Convert Shape to PCell. The original path will still be there, but on a non-layout layer. If you modify this path, the generated split path will follow the original one. If you make it wider, the path will be resolved into more splits.
The shorting is probably easy to implement, but some explanation is required how to they should look like at the corners.
Matthias
It works like a charm! I didn't know it already existed, or at least I could not find it back, but the use is similar to the ROUND_PATH Pcell which is available by default. The corners can indeed be tricky. I can think of 2 ways but both are not ideal:
1) for orthogonal routing the horizontal and vertical lines could all cross in the corner (like a grid), but this means a local higher density.
2) lines keep being parallel (like "L"'s) in the corners but this could mean that the inner line sections could be much less resistive than the outer ones between two shortings which is not ideal either (unless you have two corners in between the shorting lines).
I tend to go for option one mostly, but it would be great to have both option available over time.
The idea of having the shorts is not to loose the full-length of each of the parallel lines that would have a process-related interruption.
Thanks again for the great support and tool!
Cheers,
Tomas