Placement and routing have always been an integral part of printed circuit board design. The productivity of the product is often (if not always) achieved best if the PCB has a proper placement of the components and effective routing to support the placement. With the increased complexity of the designs and smaller board sizes, routing of signals has become more challenging. Designers are always looking for ways to ease routing complexity and hence reduce the turnaround time.
Due to various critical routing situations like differential pairs, bus routings, and critical nets, PCB designers may seek the possibility of pin/net swapping at different levels and at different stages of the design flow. In the Cadence PCB flow, there are fast and easy ways to perform pin swapping, gate swapping and package swapping, all of which help designers ease the routing on the board and synchronize the changes with the schematic. This blog post describes the swapping techniques used in the Cadence PCB Flow using Allegro Design Entry CIS (DECIS) as front-end and Allegro PCB Editor as back-end software.
At a broad level there are 2 steps required to do the swapping:
1. Preparing the schematic and library for pin swapping.
2. Perform the required swapping on the PCB Board file.
Preparing the schematic & library for pin swapping
Fig 1. Package properties dialog box showing PinGroup assignment.
Specify a unique number in the PinGroup column for specific pins you want to swap within the gate/function. Only pins with the same value of PinGroup can only be swapped. For example, if all input pins are allowed to be swapped, specify a value of 1 to all input pins and 2 to all output pins for the PinGroup property, as shown in Fig 2.
Fig 2. User Properties dialog box at Library level
As per the above example, you are allowed to swap the pins across all 4 sections. If you want to restrict the pin swapping across some sections only, the value of SWAP_INFO should be changed accordingly. For e.g.: SWAP_INFO = (S1+S2),(S3+S4) will allow pin swapping between section 1 (S1) & section 2 (S2) and not with the other 2 sections (i.e. S3 and S4). Similarly, Pins between section 3 (S3) & section 4 (S4) can only be swapped within the 2 sections.
NOTE: Pins with the same pin group property can only be swapped among themselves.
Fig 3. Create Netlist Dialog Box
Note: If you do not generate the board file during netlist creation, you could import the schematic logic to Allegro PCB Editor using the option File > Import > Logic command from within the PCB Editor.
Pin Swapping in Allegro PCB Editor
Once the schematic netlist is imported in Allegro PCB Editor board file, place the components on the board file and notice the unrouted connections.
To swap the pins on the board file, select Place > Swap > Pins
Fig 4. Pin Swap command in PCB Editor
a. Select the pin on the footprint that needs to be swapped.
b. PCB Editor highlights the other available pins that can be swapped with the selected pin (from step #a). If no pins are highlighted, read the command window at the bottom for an appropriate message.
c. Select the pin from the highlighted group. Right Click > Done, to complete the swap operation.
Fig 5. All swappable pins are highlighted in PCB Editor
Refer to the complete AppNote for a detailed procedure about each of the steps involved in the process and also to learn more about the following:
BackAnnotate the swapping information (updated netlist) to the schematic and get the schematic in sync with the board file.
Some important aspects of the gate/function swap and component swaps.
Generating a swap report.
Note: The above link can only be accessed by Cadence customers who have valid login credentials for Cadence Online Support (http://support.cadence.com).
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