The library manager

Cadence stores designs in libraries. Several designs may be stored into a single library. A design may consist of several Cells. A Cell may exist in several different forms of representation, e. g. schematic, Verilog or VHDL code for different levels of abstraction, layouts in different flavours. These representations are called Views.

The library manager is a tool with which you can browse several libraries and open design views for reading and writing. You can invoke the library browser by the menu command Tools -> Library Manager. The library manager now pops up:

You see three columns:

• The leftmost (Library) lists the librarys available to you. You can change add and remove libraries via the Edit -> Library Path... menu command. Currently, the library called analogLib is selected.
• The middle column (Cell) displays the content of the analogLib.
• The rightmost column displays the views available for the resistor (res). Amongst others, you see the symbol that enables you to insert the resistor into a schematic and some data views needed by the simulators.

You can have an better structured view by clicking onto the Show Categories check box. The result for this library is shown in the next picture. Any cell can be put into a category. There may even be subcategories. In your own library you can create own categories by the File -> New -> Category... menu command. This feature is especially useful in large libraries.

Which library is the right one

Good question. Now a short answer. The analogLib is the standard library from Cadence. In this library you find "ideal" devices and sources. The PRIMLIB contains "real" devices, this library depends on the company which process you use. In our case it is a library from AMS. Library HRDLIB contains digital standard cells, in IOLIB you find padcells and SFCLIB contains logos and layermarkers from AMS. Process independent libraries are for example US_8ths where are different sheetborders included.