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Welcome
Welcome to EE425a/ENAS875a. This year we will be designing, laying out, and simulating digital integrated circuits using a set of CAD/Verification tools from Cadence. These tools are often referred to collectively as "Cadence." Cadence has many versions of many tools available and we have several of these at Yale.
This semester we will use "Front to Back Design Environment 5.1.41," which contains tools for schematic editing and simulation, physical layout, verification, analog and digital simulation.
Getting Access
Undergrads should already have physical access to the workstations in Engineering Student Center. Grad Students need to put in a request to have their ID cards activated for the card readers on the ESC doors. Talk to Erica in the business office and she will give you the form you need. If you have never signed up for a unix account at Yale before, you will need to do so, here:
Request New Account
Installing Cadence 5.1.41
Cadence 5.1.41 is already installed on the Jove cluster so you just have to set up your account properly to begin using it.
First you will create a working directory in your home directory by typing:
mkdir ~/cdscad
Next you will set up your environment files.
- Download cdsenv.txt and save it to your home directory as .cdsenv (note the period before the filename! The downloaded file MUST be renamed)
- Download bash_profile.txt and save it to your home directory as .bash_profile (note the period before the filename! The downloaded file MUST be renamed)
Note that these files have the .txt extension only because of the limitations of the wiki.
Installing the NCSU CDK
At this point we will install the NCSU CDK. This is a design kitdeveloped by folks at North Carolina State University. It contains allthe necessary information about the various processes available throughthe MOSIS foundry service including techfiles, design rules, devicemodels, etc.
- Copy the design kit files from my home directory to yours by typing:
cp /home/introvlsi/ncsu-cdk-1.5.1.tar ~/
- Untar the file with the following command:
tar xvf ncsu-cdk-1.5.1.tar
- Copy the file ~/ncsu-cdk-1.5.1/cdssetup/cdsinit to the working directory ~/cdscad/ and rename it '.cdsinit'
- (Skip this step) Set an environment variable CDK_DIR that points to the location of the CDK by adding the following line to the .bash_profile file that you created in your home directory. It doesn't really matter where you put it, I put it near the beginning where the other setenv statements are:
export CDK_DIR=(your home directory)/ncsu-cdk-1.5.1 #(to replace the command export CDK_DIR=/home/yj45/ncsu-cdk-1.5.1)
- Create a new cds.lib file or edit your existing cds.lib. Either copy the file:
~/ncsu-cdk-1.5.1/cdssetup/cds.lib
into your working directory ~/cdscad/, or open it and paste the contents into your existing cds.lib.
(New users: if you already have a cds.lib but you have never used Cadence before then you can just replace the old one.)
At this point you should be able to run ICFB and use the design kit. Please give it a try just to ensure that the setup went as planned. At the command prompt, type:
cd cdscad
icfb&
You should get two windows, a big one that says "Library Manager" atthe top, and a smaller one that says "icfb" at the top. The last linein this smaller window should read "Done loading NCSU_CDKcustomizations." If not, you did something wrong. Please re-read the directions and try again.
Note that after installation, you will continue to use the three commands above to launch Cadence tools.