Lab 1 - EE 421L Fall 2020 

Authored by: Nathan Pina
Email: pinan1@unlv.nevada.edu
Due Date: 9/2/20

Lab Description:
Introduction to creating HTML lab reports for the EE421L course, installation of cadence

Pre-Lab:
-  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)
Prior to starting this lab, I reviewed the tutorials covering the editing of webpages using HTML.
 
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Main Lab Work:
The first portion of the lab involves following the steps of Tutorial 1 on CMOSedu.com.This will involve editing specific files, directories, and rule defintions in MobaXTerm in order to run Cadence properly.

Additonally, you should also make sure to look over the Helpful Hints section of the CMOSedu website and follow the neccessary steps to:
- Auto select "Cellview" when saving/loading states
- Set Spectre as the default simulator
- Set the graph background to white
These will be helpful later on and speed up the simulation process. Other changes can also be made at your own discretion.

Once the neccesary changes are made, navigate into the CMOSedu directory and launch Cadence using the "virtuoso &" command.

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Next, create a library (File -> New -> Library) and set the title to "Tutorial_1" and attach the AMI 0.60u C5N (3M, 2P, high-res) library.

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After creating the library, add a cell and name it "R_div" using (File -> New -> Cell View).

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Note: In order for library to work correctly. you must make sure the newly created library is defined in the cds.lib. If this is not the case, add the line below and subsitute the username with your own.

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Once the library is working properly, launch the "Tutorial_1" schematic and proceed to create a voltage divider. To draft the needed components, navigate to the "Create" tab and click on "Instance" (binded to I). From here naviagte to the needed components in the NCSU_Analog_Parts library and grab a voltage source, resistors, and ground. Place the components and wire them together (binded to W). These wires can also be named, which will be useful for simulations (binded to L). Finally, in order to set the values of the components, select them and hit "Q".

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Use the "Save and Check" feature to ensure there are no errors in the schematic and it is ready for simulation.

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For this simulation, we'll using a transient set for one second (Setup -> Simulator/Directory/Host). Make sure to select "tran" in the analysis window and check the "Enable" option at the bottom of the window.

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From here, select the two wires that you wish to visualize in the simulation (Outputs -> To Be Plotted -> Select on Schematic ). For this example, "Vin" and "Vout" were chosen. The simulation is now ready to be run, proceed to hit the green "Netlist and Run" button the right side of the window.

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The simulation will then pop up and show the two variables of the voltage divider and their corresponding values. If you wanted to change the thickness, style, or color of the output lines, simply right click the variable names and adjust them as you see fit.  

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The second portion of this lab was to demonstrate the process and importance of backing up all of your work.

To back up my files, I first navigated to the "Tutorial_1" folder in MobaXTerm and downloaded it to my desktop.

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 I then zipped the files and uploaded it to my EE421L folder on my Google Drive. 

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To ensure that I don't lose hours of work, I will make it habit to constantly backup any files I have.