Lab 1 - EE 421L 

Authored by Steven Leung

Leungs@unlv.nevada.edu

Today's date: 8/24

 

Pre-lab work

 

   


The main purpose of this lab is to be able to draw my own schematic in Cadence and be able to simulate it. 

   

The first step of this lab is to download Xterm which will be used to remote connect to Candence 


 

There is quite a bit of setup to be done before being able to simulate your own files. This includes requesting an account from Dr. Greg and completeing the following tutorial http://cmosedu.com/cmos1/cadence/remote_x/remote_x.htm

   

This first step to creating your own circuit to simulate is to crate a library for it in the library. I called my library Tutorial_1

 

 

  

The next step is to create a new cell with a schematic view.  This is where the circuit will be drawn. To look for components use the keybind i (instance) to search for resistors, voltage sources, ground, etc. To wire the components, use the bindkey w (wire). Another useful bindkey is f (to fit the screen).

 

  

Before simulating the circuit, launch ADE (Analog Design Environment) and make sure that the simulator is set to spectre. In the ADC, the subsection analyses is where we can set the type of simulation or simulation time in this case. Output is where we can set what nodes we want to take a look at. These are set through the analyses and output dropdown menus respectively. 

    

 

   

To avoid having to set up the analyses and output everytime we reopen this circuit, we can save the state through setup -> save state followed by clicking cellview and ok.

 

  

We are now ready to simulate by clicking the green run button. The following should appear. 

 

 

This is exactly what we expected from the circuit, a 10k 10k voltage divider will yield an output of .5 V when the input is 1 V.

 
   
The background color width of the plot can be changed manually or automatically by including a few lines in the cdsinit file in the CMOSedu directory. The specific lines of code can be found at http://cmosedu.com/videos/cadence/cdsinit.htm
   

This image shows the lines of code to set spectre to the simulator and the background to white every time Cadence starts instead of manually doing it.

  

Backup

Labs will be zipped and emailed to myself every week as a method of backing up the data. 

 

 

           

 

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