Lab 1: Lab Intro, HTML Reports, Cadence Tutorial - EE 421L 

Authored By: Joey Yurgelon

Email: yurgelon@unlv.nevada.edu

August 25, 2015

Pre-lab Work:

• The lab reports will be drafted using html and placed on CMOSedu.
• Prior to the first day of lab, but no earlier than one week before the lab starts, get a CMOSedu account, using your UNLV email address, from Dr. Baker, rjacobbaker@gmail.com  
• Review the material seen here covering editing webpages (do this before the first lab) 

• Students will learn how to configure Cadence, upload HTML reports, and understand the policies of EE 421L.

• This first lab will go through the first part of Tutorial 1 seen here. 

•  Go through Tutorial 1 up to the following image (the 25th image in the tutorial).
• Simply show some of the images in this tutorial (that you generated) with some simple coherent narrative.
• Discuss how you will do regular backups while working on the future labs by zipping up your work and emailing it to yourself, uploading it to dropbox, etc. with the file names including at least two images supporting your discussion. 

Experimental Results: 

    Exercise #1: Simply show some of the images in this tutorial (that you generated) with some simple coherent narrative. 

• To begin, one must obtain an account from Dr. Greg. The first half of the tutorial is merely setting up Cadence for use in EE 421/L. These steps are outlined above in the Xterm written and video documentation. The purpose of this tutorial was to give the student the chance to go through the necessary steps in creating a project library, drawing a simple voltage divider schematic, and then simulate the results through Cadence. 
• Building the schematic was quick and easy. The devices needed to be located via the component manager interface allotted to us by Cadence. These libraries, pointed to by our .cdslib file, contain all of the components needed in this class, and were configured by the Xterm tutorial above. After locating the resistor object through the instance button, I placed two in series (using right mouse click to rotate), and then connected one end to ground via the 'gnd' object. The DC source was added the exact same way, and placed appropriately. By using the 'W' key to route wires, I was quickly able to route the circuit as needed. To label nodes on the circuitry, for easy coherent simulations, the 'L' command was used to place the correct 'in' and 'out' nets on the circuit. These will be referred to by the simulation traces later. 
• After hitting 'Save and Check', one can move on to simulating the circuit. This was done by going to the "Launch" tab located at the top and then hitting "ADE L." My simulation was set to Spectre by default which lead me to use the 'Analysis' tab to set up a tran simulation, and set my outputs as nodes labeled earlier via the 'Outputs' tab (Select on schematic option). The last step was to hit the green button to run the simulation, and verify the output. 
• Photos can be seen below of milestones in the process. In the last photo, we can see that the simulation verifies our expectations. We expect to get a 0.5 V output with a 1 V input in this resistor divider. 

   Exercise #2: Discuss how you will do regular backups while working on the future labs by zipping up your work and emailing it to yourself, uploading it to dropbox, etc. with the file names including at least two images supporting your discussion. 

• All my work is backed up locally via my laptop as well as on my OneDrive. My OneDrive then syncs with desktop to download the latest copy when powered on. Evidence of the local and OneDrive backup can be seen below. 

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