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How to print your Cadence layout in A0

First you have to modify your personal printer setup file .cdsplotinit in your home directory. You have to add an A0 plotter with a high dpi-resolution. An example for an A0 printer is given here: cdsplotinit. In case there is no .cdsplotinit file in your home directory, just create a new file with the printer definition, given above.

Now you have to print your layout in Cadence. Therefore start Cadence and open your layout. To achieve a good printout quality you have to use the LSW window to make all layer visible:

  • Edit -> Set Valid Layers -> All Valid

In the LSW window press now NV (nothing visible) and select only significant layers like:

  • MET1, MET2, MET3, ...
  • Poly, Diff
  • VIAs
  • NWELL
  • ...
Remarks:
  1. It makes no sense to select e.g. Contacts or text layers visible in large plots, because in the plot they can not be identified. It only increases the size of the plot file.
  2. Upper metal layers should be "transparent", e.g. only framed without filler structures (or only slightly filled).
  3. To increase the amount of "visible structures" in your plot you have to arrange the filling structures so that low layout levels are not overdrawn by upper layout levels. The filling structures are changeable via your LSW windows (Edit -> Display Resource Editor).

To print now the layout, please proceed with the following steps in your Cadence layout window:

  • Design -> Plot -> Submit
And apply the following settings:
  • Header: OFF
Then
  • Display Options:
    • Axes: OFF
    • Path Center Line: NO
  • Plot Options:
    • Plotter Name: A0 (xxx dpi) (see remark 1)
    • Paper Size: A0
    • Press "Fit To Page" and disable again the button
    • Change inches to cm (see remark 2)
    • Send Plot Only To File: FILENAME
    • Mail Log To: OFF
    • Local tmp directory: (see remark 3)
Remarks:
  1. A higher dpi number increases the resolution of your output plot. Because Cadence suppresses small structures at small dpi numbers, you should print normally with a resolution of around 4800 dpi.
  2. The plot size should be within the plot size of A0 (84cm x 118cm). Because of possible non-printable boarders it is always good to decrease slightly the printing size via the scale factor
  3. In the specified temp directory should be enough space.

Now you can print your postscript layout file.

After the print file written to disk, you have to recalculated the postscript file into a rtl printer file. This is done via the following steps:

  • With GhostScript we transform the ps file in a rtl printer format. Please check if the installed version of GhostScript supports the dnj650c printer. If so, you can start the transformation:

gs -sOutputFile=DEST-FILE -sDEVICE=dnj650c -sPAPERSIZE=a0 -dBATCH SOURCE-FILE

whereas SOURCEFILE is your postscript file and DEST-FILE is your rtl printing file

Remark:

  1. GhostScript will use a large amount of temp disk space (up to 2-10 GB). Via the environment variable TEMP you can change the standard temp disk (e.g. export TEMP=/tmp)
  2. Some file systems doesn't support file sizes larger than 2 GB. Therefore GhostScript will maybe abort the calculation of the rtl-file because of the temp file size. A good solution is to change to a 64-bit computer with no limitation on file sizes (like fourofeight ).
Send the rtl plotfile to the printer:

scp filename iz2@aixterm9.urz.uni-heidelberg.de:/tmp/

Login on aixterm9 with iz2:

lpr -P hp75 filename sends the file to the queue
lpq -P hp75 checks the queue

(Jobs on HP75 are manually operated, so it can take a while)
Printingtime: approx. 15-20 minutes
Pick up at URZ. Finish!

Thanks again to Sven Löchner for his preparatory work.
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