“There is no fast, easy shortcut for the word abbreviation.” - Anonymous There are countless number of abbreviations, acronyms, and jargons that we use day in and day out, without caring too much about what they actually stand for. Our mind gets tuned to perceive them in a certain way and respond with some typical actions whenever we notice them. A common example is 'etc.'— we use it so casually in our day-to-day writing, but not all people know its real meaning. Etc. or etc is an abbreviation of et cetera, a Latin expression meaning "and similar other things" or "and so on. (source: Wikipedia) Coming back to the land of Cadence products — yes, we're no exception when it comes to using acronyms! I'm sure you too would have noticed many abbreviated terms while working with our products and you may not be knowing all of them. In this blog, I'll talk about some common yet important terms that you get to see while working with Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis — PSF and PSF XL — which are nothing but the waveform file formats. If you frequently use ViVA to analyze your simulation results, PSF files are something that wouldn't go amiss! You will have to deal with these files often when working with results databases in the Results Browser. Our constant strive for excellence has made us bring a lot of exciting improvements in the PSF formats over the years. So, let’s try to find out more about these formats and see how they have evolved over the releases. Getting Acquainted with PSF and PSF XL Formats First things first – Definitions! PSF (Parameter Storage Format) is a waveform format created by Virtuoso® Spectre Circuit Simulator and other simulators integrated into the Virtuoso® Analog Design Environment . It provides a powerful and flexible data model, but is slow in reading unstructured multi-rate data. The PSF format library includes PSF binary format, PSF text format, PSF RTSF format, PSF XL format, etc. When Spectre saves results, you can define different formats for different analysis. For example, RF analysis uses PSF binary format, and transient analysis uses PSF XL format. PSF XL is an extension to the PSF format used for analog transient data. It is fast as it uses packet streams for writing data and uses a reverse flattened skip-list data structure for reading data. This format provides a high compression rate for large circuit designs. PSF XL also supports the reading of in-memory simulator data, which provides external viewers an access to the PSF XL waveform data that is still buffered in the simulator memory. This feature is useful if you use AMS, because in this case you often need to pause the simulation when certain conditions are met, and then inspect the analog and digital waveform data up to the last simulation time point. So, next time when you open the results databases in PSF and PSF XL formats, you'll know what they mean! Some Noteworthy Performance Improvements in PSF XL In the era of fast-growing technology, the world around us is getting better and smarter, Cadence products are no less! Started back in early 2000s, ViVA took a giant leap to constantly meet the customers' requirements. To stay put in the favorite list of customers and to always remain ahead of the pack, we've made many significant performance improvements to the PSF XL format over the IC6.1.7 and ICADV12.3 ISR releases. Let's take a quick look at them: Improved read time performance of PSF binary and PSF XL database with many short-signals (say, 10M signals of 200 data points) On average, the read time of PSF Binary format is reduced to about 38%. The new PSF XL format saves the signal attributes in binary format, which reduces the read time of PSF XL format by 78%. Signal attributes saved in binary format are also 6% smaller than the previous PSF XL versions, on average. Reduced PSF XL database size by implementing the following solutions: Sharing of time and value vectors Compressing lossless data Using hybrid file format to store data The experimental results show some brilliant improvements in the database size, which are listed in the table below: As you can see that the size of databases generated using the new PSF XL version is much lighter than its previous versions. In addition, the new version is much more fast, robust, and efficient. I'd recommend you to try it out now and see the difference for yourself! Related Resources Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis XL User Guide 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 Vashishtha![]()
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