Creating custom strokes in Virtuoso? 

Just wondering if anyone here could help me in figuring out how to create my own strokes in Virtuoso.  I've recently switched from using Mentor IC Station to Cadence VLE and would really like to preserve the strokes used in IC Station.

I've looked through the Virtuoso user's manual, but only found mention of the three files used by Virtuoso to produce strokes.  However, it seems the the stroke.il file is encrypted and this is the file that actually holds the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.  Is there a 'stroke editor' tool in Virtuoso somewhere that allows you to edit this stroke.il file?  Or are strokes not editable in Virtuoso?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

There is a stroke editor (called "sted"), but I should warn you - this does not exist on Linux (it was never ported, due to it containing some pretty prehistoric code).

Then to load the code, you'd do something like:

; the following two files need to be loaded from /tools/dfII/etc/sted
load("stroke.il")
load("defstrokes.il")
hiLoadStrokeFile("/path/to/your/def.strokes" "layout")

where the def.strokes is the file produced by sted - it contains the definition of the stroke, as well as the SKILL function it calls.

You might want to take a look at sourcelink solution 11003650 too.

Andrew.

Thanks Andrew. This helped immensely!

You wouldnt happen to know where they hide all the stroke commands, would you?

I thought I saw them while cruising through one of the manuals, but now I can't find them for the life of me.

Hi Andrew,

We've Solaris OS, can "sted" run on it? If so, where can I get it from?
I want to help ppl by creating an IC-Station like strokes for Cadence and share..
Can you just guide me?

Thanks in advance,
Ahmad,

Did you try typing "sted" in the UNIX window? It's in the same place as some of the executables - in
/tools/bin (you should have this in your path for the tools to work properly).

Regards,

Andrew.

It's pretty unlikely that it is not installed, given that it is included with the following products:

111
14000
14010
14020
206
21400
3000
300
3011
3111
311
32500
34500
34510
365
501
550
570
70110
70120
70130
70510
70520
71110
71120
71130
71510
71520
90001

which is virtually everything in the IC stream. Did you look in /tools/bin to see if it is there? Perhaps your UNIX path is not set to include this. Perhaps you run the IC tools via a wrapper script, and so don't directly have this in your path?

Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,
Thanks a lot for your prompt reply ..

I don't know in fact what does the above numbers mean! How can i specifically check if i have it or not? Something from CIW or like that..

Yes, I'd looked at $CDS_ROOT/tools/bin and i didn't find it there..
But there's something i want to point out.. I said we've Solaris, but we don't have Cadence on Solaris.. We use Cadence on Linux RHEL 4.. Does that make difference??

Thanks and regards,
Ahmad,

I just fell off my chair laughing, I'm afraid.

If you have Solaris, but no software running on it, it's not going to magically work, is it?

As I said in my posting from June 2006, it's never been ported to Linux.

You'll need to get the IC tools, and install them on Solaris. The list of numbers above is the list of products within the IC stream which contain sted, so virtually any product would do.

Regards,

Andrew.

I also meant to post some documentation references for strokes (one of my colleagues suggested this would be a good idea):

/doc/vlehelp/vlehelp.pdf (chap 3) and /doc/skuiref/skuiref.pdf (app D)

Regards,

Andrew.

lol :)

What i understood from your post, is that "sted" is non-portable on Linux not the generated strokes, I understood that it's something like a stand alone program that helps in creating strokes.il file, then take it to any platform to run it on Cadence..
I think i was far from the truth :(

That's exactly it. Most executables are not portable from one platform to another - for example icfb, spectre - and sted is similar. The difference is that sted doesn't exist on Linux. The data they produce is platform independent.

So you can use sted on Solaris (provided you have the software installed!) to create the strokes file, and then use that strokes file in DFII (e.g. icfb) on any platform.

Regards,

Andrew.