Do you remember the first time you used a browser with tabs? All of a sudden, there you were...surfing two, three, four websites at once in the same window. Yee-haw! Life is good. Well, now you can do the same thing in Virtuoso. Okay, so you can't put YouTube in one tab and your schematic in another (yet), but you can easily have multiple tabs with schematics, layouts, symbols, etc. all in the same window.
No more minimizing and maximizing all your windows to switch between cellviews (is it this one? no, maybe this one? how about that one?). No more pushing and popping just because you don't want to open yet another window to take a quick look inside a block. Just stick it in a new tab and click over to it whenever you need to.
So how do you get these magical tabs to appear? Take a look at the forms that pop up when you descend into a sub-block of your design or when you do File->Open... from a design window. You'll see a radio button that offers you the choice to open the cellview in a new tab, current tab or new window. Give it a try.
Well, now that you've got all your favorite cellviews opened neatly in tabs in a single window, you'd like to be able to come back to this same configuration some time in the future. Of course, that's what bookmarks are for! Go up where you see the cellnames on the tabs near the top of the window and click the right mouse button (RMB). Select Add Bookmark... Alternatively, select File->Bookmarks->Add Bookmark from the top banner menu. You can bookmark just the design in the current tab or create a composite bookmark of all tabs in that window. You can even give it a name and a description to remind yourself what you bookmarked.
To use your bookmarks later, just select File->Bookmarks from either the CIW or any design window and click on the desired name to open it. No more scrolling through the Library Manager again and again to open each design one by one. You can organize your bookmarks by selecting File->Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks from the CIW. There's even a Bookmarks Toolbar (RMB in the area near the top of the design window) for those designs you want to have available with a single click of the mouse.
This isn't meant to be a complete tutorial on how to work with bookmarks in Virtuoso. You probably already use bookmarks every day in your web browser, so using them in Virtuoso should feel pretty natural. If you'd like more information, refer to the Virtuoso Design Environment User Guide, which dedicates most of Chapter 11 to the subject.
You can also watch a video demonstrating the use of bookmarks, as well as some of the features I mentioned in my previous post in the Virtuoso Custom IC Video Library on Sourcelink.
Stay tuned to this space for more Virtuoso tips, because there are always things out there that you didn't know...
As always, feel free to share comments or suggestions or your own tips and tricks.
Stacey Whiteman