Imagine what would happen if we were living in the world with no search engines. Wouldn’t we find ourselves lost in the deep information ocean, struggling to find the relevant stuff? The situation would be chaotic and nothing short of a nightmare. Cutting-edge search technology has given us unprecedented access to information at the click of a button—something that our previous generations could only dream of. Web search utilities have become so seamless that we don’t realize how deeply they’re embedded in our daily life. Being an information engineer, I could go on for hours discussing this topic in depth. But that is not the agenda of this post. So let’s shift our focus back to the EDA world and see how search utilities are implemented in Cadence products and how they help make your work easy. Are you Searching for Some Specific Signals in the Results Browser? If your answer is yes, then you’ll be pleased to know that the Results Browser in Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis has made the signal browsing easier by providing advanced search capabilities. The Results Browser is a data-bank of different types of simulation results databases that further include different types of signals. When too many databases are loaded in it, it’s not easy to find your choice of signal on which you want to perform graph analysis. This in-built search feature can't only save you from messing up with signals, but also rightly serves you with the signals you’re looking for. How to Perform Search in the Results Browser? The Search toolbar is not displayed when you open the Results Browser. Click the Search tab to view it. Now, let's see how you can use this toolbar to search signals. In the drop-down list, select the types of signals you want to search, such as voltage, current, logic, all, and so on. Type the search string in the given text box. Select Shell or RegExp from the drop-down list to search signals based on a shell or regular expression. Select the Match case check box to perform a case-sensitive search. Select the All DBs check box to search the specified pattern in all the open results databases in the Results Browser. Then, click the Search button. All the signals matching the search criteria will be listed right there. Isn’t it so simple? Are You Stuck with a Forever-Rotating Search Wheel? If the search process is taking longer than the usual time probably because the result databases are huge, then you don't need to worry – you can now choose to stop the search process. Just click the Cancel button in the Searching pop up, as shown in the figure below. It is an additional functionality offered here that could save you time. Taking a Closer Look at the Search Results... Search results display icons to indicate the type of the searched signals. If the results directory path is too long to fit in the search pane, it's right-justified for better readability. If you hover the mouse pointer on this path, the tooltip displays the complete path. Search is performed at directory-level, which means only the currently-selected directory and its sub-directories are searched to find signal(s) matching the specified search pattern. To expand the search to all databases, just click the All DBs check box. Here's Something More... The Results Browser also has the Filter toolbar available that you can use to filter out some specific signals in the currently-opened database. It comes handy when you've a huge database and you want to view only selected signals in it. The Filter toolbar is right there at the bottom of the Results Browser when you open it for the first time. It looks similar to the Search toolbar and works pretty much the same way (see the figure below). Related Resources Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL user Guide Filtering and Searching for Signals Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis Workshop For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com . About Virtuosity Virtuosity has been our most viewed and admired blog series for a long time that has brought to fore some lesser known, yet very useful software and documentation improvements, and also shed light on some exciting new offerings in Virtuoso. We are now expanding the scope of this series by broadcasting the voice of different bloggers and experts, who would continue to preserve the legacy of Virtuosity , and try to give new dimensions to it by covering topics across the length and breadth of Virtuoso, and a lot more… Click Subscribe to visit the Subscription box at the top of the page in which you can submit your email address to receive notifications about our latest Virtuosity posts. Happy Reading! Ashu VashishthaImage may be NSFW.
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