CustomExplorer

Overview
CustomExplorer™ and Custom WaveView™ form a comprehensive transistor-level debugging environment for analog, mixed-signal and SoC designs. CustomExplorer provides a host of tools for navigating transistor-level designs and verifying simulation results.

Download Datasheet

Introduction
CustomExplorer is tightly integrated with Custom WaveView, enabling customizable waveform analysis. Custom WaveView provides powerful tools for displaying waveforms, performing calculations and making measurements (see Figure 1). Together, these tools aid designers in rapidly performing customized advanced analyses in a highly-productive design debugging and waveform analysis environment.

CustomExplorer Design Browsers
The Design Browsers allow quick access to the most complex hierarchy design data. After loading a netlist or simulation results, the user can probe the design’s hierarchy by expanding the Lint, File, Deck, Flat or Output View tabs. These views, shown in Figure 2, work in concert and provide rapid access to all of the contents of the design or of a given level of hierarchy whether working with SPICE or DSPF netlists or a mix of both.

Figure 1: Transistor-level view of an analog and mixed-signal design
Figure 1: CustomExplorer’s main window concisely presents netlist
and waveform data for easy analysis and debug

Figure 2: Transistor-level view of an analog and mixed-signal design
Figure 2: CustomExplorer’s Design Browser

SPICE Lint View CustomExplorer’s SPICE Lint View performs compatibility checks that can be used to verify that the netlists being simulated conform to the proper syntax before wasting time on a long simulation before finding a problem. These checks are performed automatically as the netlist is read in with all errors or warnings being flagged in the SPICE Lint Window.

File View
Netlists for custom digital and AMS designs can be very large and complex. The File View window shows the collection of files that are referenced in the top-level netlist including complete paths to those files. CustomExplorer follows all .Include and .Lib statements to ensure that all parts of the netlist are checked.

Deck View
The Deck View tab displays the hierarchical content of the design netlist allowing the designer to query the contents of a design or cell. Selecting a subcircuit in the Deck View displays the contents of that subcircuit as well as displaying the interface pins and netnames, and parameters in the Cell View.

Cell View Window
Selecting a component or subcircuit in the Deck or Flat View tabs presents the user with a picture of that object in the Cell View window. Included in the diagram are the name of the object, its terminal names and the nets that connect to it. In the case of subcircuits, the internal netnames are also displayed making it easy to follow nets up and down the hierarchy through subcircuit boundaries. CustomExplorer’s Net Tracer can also be used to follow changing netnames with ease through the design’s hierarchy.

Fully Integrated with Custom WaveView
The Waveform Window is Custom WaveView, the industry standard for waveform analysis and measurement. Custom WaveView provides a host of capabilities for displaying, measuring, manipulating and saving simulation results. In addition to multiple panels containing waveforms, Custom WaveView also provides the ability to display more than one waveform tab allowing the designer to mix and match time and frequency domains in a single session.

Custom WaveView is a full analog and mixed-signal display and analysis environment, reading simulation results from either analog or digital simulators and allowing complete conversion between views. For instance, Custom WaveView can read in the analog results of an HSPICE simulation, convert those waveforms to digital (single or multi-bit with user selectable thresholds) and export those results for use in a digital simulation.

Cursors, Dynamic Meters, Monitors and the Measurement Tool

Cursors
Custom WaveView provides an unlimited number of cursors specifically for on-screen measurement of waveforms. Set to either the vertical or horizontal mode, these cursors can be moved around the waveform and display “X-at-Y” information appropriate to the waveform panel.

Dynamic Meters
Dynamic Meters provide rapid on– screen measurement of voltages, currents or frequencies on waveforms. Dynamic Meters are persistent across sessions and can be “replayed” against a new set of simulation results as needed (See Figure 1). Added directly to waveforms, Dynamic Meters can be configured to provide additional measurements such as Rise/Fall time, Pulse Width, Slew Rate, Signal Frequency, Pulse Duty Cycle, Difference, Jitter and Frequency over Time.

As simulation results change, Dynamic Meters update automatically presenting the user with the latest information available.

Monitors
Monitors can be added to the waveform panels to perform more complex measurements. Monitors include Derivative, Inverse Derivative, Delta Value, Cursor Average, Minimum/ Maximum/Average, Peak-to-Peak and RMS values of a given waveform.

Measurement Tool
Custom WaveView’s powerful Measurement Tool provides a wealth of design domain specific measurements that simplify design analysis. The Measurement Tool provides AC Coupled RMS, Amplitude, Baseline, Cpk and Dpu Statistics, Damping Ratio, Delay, Duty Cycle, S-Domain Frequency Value, High Pass/Low Pass/Stop Band, Mean, Mean ±3 StdDev, Over/Undershoot and Quality Factor to name a few.

HSPICE .Measure Statement Extraction and Replay
CustomExplorer contains the ability to scan a netlist and extract out all HSPICE .Measure statements and save them in a file. These statements retain their full design hierarchy and can be modified and replayed against existing simulation results. This capability eliminates lost simulation time when the designer determines, after a simulation, that additional .Measures needs to be performed, or when a given .Measure was incorrect during the simulation. In the latter case, the simulation does not need to be rerun as the incorrect .Measure can be fixed and replayed against the results saving time and effort.

Toolboxes and Assistants
CustomExplorer’s Toolboxes are provided to simplify specific measurements for a variety of common activities in waveform analysis. Assistants are provided to simply common tasks that improve accuracy and customer productivity.

ADC Design Toolbox CustomExplorer ADC Toolbox provides the necessary information when working with Analog- to-Digital converters (ADCs). This toolbox, with a simple drag and drop of a waveform, can extract the common measurements required to proof ADC designs including:

Jitter Toolbox
The built-in Jitter-vs-Time toolbox can be used to analyze clock jitter between any logic and analog target signal with respect to a reference signal. The reference signal can be an analog or logic signal from simulation output, or an idea signal defined using the width/ period/delay parameters. The jitter can be measured against the rise and fall edges of a reference signal.

Eye Diagrams
Custom WaveView’s Eye Diagram capability allows users to quick display complex waveforms using automatic extraction of the clock cycle, or by reference to an ideal clock, or to an external signal. Figure 3 shows a typical eye diagram with Cursors used to measure the eye width.

PWL Editor
Designed to overcome a major problem in developing SPICE stimuli, CustomExplorer’s PWL Editor makes it easy to graphically draw PWL waveforms and export the results as a syntax–correct PWL statement. This capability helps to eliminate wasted simulation time by allowing the user to craft and visualize PWL statements prior to the simulation run.

Other Netlist Utilities

Figure 3: Easy eye diagrams with internal, external or ideal clocks

Waveform Post-Processing with the Expression Builder
Custom WaveView hosts a powerful, scriptable expression language that can be used to construct any number of custom views of existing waveform data, or can be used to craft specialty stimuli from existing simulation runs to be passed onto successive simulations. The Expression Builder (see Figure 4) contains a large number of mathematic, RF, logic, waveform and measurement functions that can be mixed-andmatched as needed to create custom measurements. These custom measurements can be saved as macros and replayed against any simulation results as needed.

Additionally, the Expression Builder contains functions that can shift waveforms in time making it easy to compare results that occurred at different simulated times. Waveforms can also be smoothed to reduce extra time points and exported to other simulations as stimuli leading to faster analog simulations downstream.

Extensible and Open
CustomExplorer and Custom WaveView are open and extensible and both can be controlled in GUI or Batch mode with scripting. The GUI is also extensible allowing CAD teams to craft custom measurements and provide them across their organizations through the regular menu system.

Regression Scripting with the Analysis Command Environment (ACE)
The Analysis Command Environment (ACE) is a Tcl-based extension language that provides near-complete control of CustomExplorer (built-in) or Custom WaveView (via the ACE option). The ACE scripting environment contains hundreds of functions and can control the GUI, the waveform panels, the menu system or the measurement capabilities of either tool. Often used by CAD teams to extend the tools, the ACE scripting capability can also be used to perform Regression Scripting allowing designers to make changes to their design and then replay a wide variety of analyses in batch mode, freeing the designer to work on other aspects of the design.

Encapsulating these analyses also means sharing best design practices across an organization improving quality and simplifying the collection of data for design reviews.

Figure 4: Mixed-Signal Expression Builder provides many functions
for crafting complex analyses

Batch Waveform Compare
A power new capability in CustomExplorer is the Batch Waveform Compare utility. This utility allows designers to compare two sets of simulation runs in batch and produce a text report of the differences. The Batch Waveform Compare system uses a simple rules file that controls the comparisons. Users can define what signals are to be compared and the tolerances of the comparisons.

Using sample-based comparison techniques, the Batch Waveform Compare utility compares golden-totarget simulation results and supports both analog and digital waveforms. This capability helps eliminate the vast majority of manual “eyeballing” of analog or digital signals. Users have reported reducing as much as one full week of manual effort to 15 minutes for analyzing 100 analog waveforms.

Industry Standard Design Platform Integrations CustomExplorer and Custom WaveView are also integrated into industry standard design platforms to help maximize designer productivity during the design phase. A native integration of these tools into Synopsys’ Galaxy Custom Designer™ system helps form a complete environment for analog block authoring in a single platform for both cell-based and custom design. Other design platforms integrations include:

Support File Formats Custom WaveView provides support for over 45 different file formats giving it the highest support of simulation file formats in the industry.

Platform Support