Importing Care Area Files
Care Areas can be generated from many sources and it is possible that one might
wish to import them from another application (for example, Mentor’s Calibre program) into the Care Area Wizard. Why? To see where the care areas
lie when displayed over the chip layout or to use the Wizard’s ability to merge and intelligently reduce the number ofcare area regions.
A Care Area File (default file extension: .CAF) is binary file that meets the following criterion:
1. it contains only rectangular boundaries as entity elements.
2. all boundaries on a common layer are considered to be part of the same
selection set.
3. It may contain hierarchy but such hierarchy will be exploded except for:
Regular AREF’s (may not be rotated, scaled or mirrored) are preserved.
4. The units and grid of the Care Area File must match the units and grid of the
chip layout file.
Load the chip layout file that the care areas are associated with. One normally
turns off the layers for display and turns on the cell reference outline.
From the Care Area Wizard pull down, select the menu item: Import Care Area File ...
Use the Open Care Area File dialog box to select the desired CAF. While we suggest one uses a default file extension of .caf this is not always
the case.
The file will be imported and the data converted into CA Wizard’s internal care area database. The selections will be highlighted on screen.
A separate selection set will be generated for each layer of data found in the CAF file. The selection
set gets its name from the name of the file imported with the layer and
datatype appended. For example if the CAF file was named VX5050.caf and it had
data on layers 1:0, 5:0 10:0 and 254:0 and 255:0 then a total of 5 selections would be generated:
VX5050_1_0
VX5050_5_0
VX5050_10_0
VX5050_254_0
VX5050_255_0
These selections cannot have additional filters associated with them such as
parent or nesting level since they came from an external source.