Cadence Allegro Customization

Most problems that are encountered during installation are related to customizing the Cadence Allegro start up to

a) load the AWROut menus

b) load the "context" i.e. the AWR compiled SKILL module

Allegro installations (especially corporate ones) have generally been customized by the CAD administrators to support a number of users. The Allegro executables and support files are often placed on a network drive which is write protected from the users to prevent them from editing or otherwise changing the executables or start up files.

So there are two installation approaches: GLOBAL (which affects all users) and LOCAL (which affects only a single user). If you wish to install AWROut without changes to the global Allegro files then use the procedure below:

Local Allegro Install

Every Allegro user has a local directory defined as his "HOME." even if the Allegro executables are installed on a network drive. You should be able to determine the HOME directory by checking your environment variables and searching for the variable called HOME.

Under a user's HOME directory there should be a directory called pcbenv. This directory can contain all sorts of useful files. In particular we are interested in the initialization file called allegro.ilinit. This file exists in two locations: in the Cadence Allegro installation hierarchy (which we can't touch) and in the pcbenv directory.

   <CDSROOT>                             <HOME>                  <ACS_AWROUT_DIR>
   |                                        |                            |
   +- <bin>                                 +- <pcbenv>                  + - acs.key
   |                                               |                     + - acsawrout.form
   +- <data>                                allegro.ilinit               + - acsfiledlg.form
   |                                                                     + - acsprogress.form
   +- <doc>                                                              + -  awrout.cxt
   |                                                                     + - LoadAWROUT.il
   +- <tools>                                                            + - LoadMenu.il
   |                                                                     + - 3DiBool.exe
   +- <share>                                                            .
           |                                                             .
           +- <cdssetup> 
           |
           +- <library>
           |
           +- <pcb>
               |
     <etc> ----+---- <text>
      |                |
      +- <skill>       +- <cuimenus>
            |                  | 
     allegro.ilinit         allegro.men
                          

When Allegro starts up, it reads any directives found in the allegro.ilinit located in the installation hierarchy and acts on them; it then reads a user's local copy of allegro.ilinit and acts on any instructions or commands it finds there.

For a local install of AWROut we are only going to modify files on the user's machine and do not touch anything in CDSROOT.

Modifying the Local allegro.ilinit

To load AWROut whenever Allegro starts up we will add the following line to allegro.ilinit. (If allegro.ilinit does not exist in your pcbenv directory, create it and this will then be the only line in the file:

       (load "<AWROUT_INSTALL_DIR>/LoadAWROut.il")

This causes the SKILL file LoadAWROut.il to run.

LoadAWROut.il

This set of SKILL commands does two things:

a) it loads the AWROut.cxt context file.

ACS_AWROUT_DIR = "C:/wcad/AWROut"
(loadContext "C:/wcad/AWROut/AWROUT.cxt")

b) it calls another SKILL command file, LoadMenu.il, that dynamically loads the menus.

(load "C:/wcad/AWROut/LoadMenu.il")

Note that only Allegro 16.2 and later have the required SKILL commands that allow us to load the menus dynamically at startup.

Since we are doing everything in the user's local HOME directory and on his local machine, When AWROut is installed this way, it does not affect any other Allegro user on the network.

Global Install

For a global install we are able to modify the files under the CDSROOT hierarchy. There are two files to be modified: The startup file, allegro.ilinit and the menu file, allegro.men.

Add the following lines to the APD start up file which is located in:

<cds_root>\share\pcb\etc\skill\apd.ilinit

If no such file exists in that directory (or the SKILL directory does not exist) then create them.

    ACS_AWROUT_DIR = "<directory where AWROUT execs are installed>"
    (loadContext "<apd_install_dir>/AWROUT.cxt")

Clearly this file has to be customized to point to wherever you chose to install the AWROut executables. They are probably going to be on a network drive if you are making this accessible to everyone on the network.

Modifying the Menu File: allegro.men

Menu Files for Allegro (and all variants) are located in the directory:

<cds_root>\share\pcb\text\cuimenus

Add the following lines before the END statement:

POPUP "AWROut"
BEGIN
MENUITEM "AWROut...","skill (AcsAwrOut)"
MENUITEM SEPARATOR
MENUITEM "&About AWROut..","skill (AcsAwrOutAbout)"
MENUITEM "&Revision History..","skill (AcsAwrOutRev)"
END

Note: some variations of Allegro such as the signal integrity versions may use an alternate menu file such as specctraquest.men. You may need to modify those files also as you did for allegro.men.