Using Design Manager
Jack Meador, Madhu Parameswaran and Russ Radke
Washington State University, Pullman WA.
David M. Zar,
Washington University, St. Louis MO.
3-5-96
Minor modifications have been made at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
in Spring 1999 & Spring 2001 for CS755.
To invoke Design Manager , follow these steps:
Change directory to mgc.
Type dmgr at the shell prompt. This command starts up Design
Manager .
The left half of the window shows the available tools. The right half
shows your Mentor directory(navigator window) which is where you should
store all of your Mentor designs. Your directory will probably be empty
as you have not, as yet, created any designs.
The main Design Manager window(session window) or the inside
windows may be moved, resized, minimized or closed in the same way other
windows are manipulated. You must first click on the window to be manipulated
however.
Before going any further, let's take a look at some Mentor Graphics
basics. In Design Manager , and most other tools, the left mouse
button is used to click on (or select) items. The right mouse button is
used to bring out pop-up menus. The pop-up menus are context sensitive.
That is to say that, depending on where your mouse pointer is when you
right-click, a different menu may appear. Try this now by first selecting
the left tools window and then using the right mouse button to bring
up the pop-up menu. You must click in the window, not on the title bar
or window border. Notice how the menu's title is ``TOOL OPERATIONS'' Now
do the same for the right window. Here, the pop-up menu is different and
is context sensitive.
To begin our tour of Design Manager , start by using the maximize
button in the upper right corner of the window frame to make the window
as large as possible. The window should now fill the entire screen. You
will notice that the inner windows got larger but their contents don't
fill the new areas. To clean up your windows, use the right mouse button
to bring out the pop-up menu in the Tools window and select Update
Window . Now, the whole area of the window will be better used. You
can now see many of the tools that Mentor provides for your use. These
will be described in detail in their respective tutorials, but we will
use one, the Editor, for this exercise.
Let's start by invoking Editor from the Tools menu.
Simply double click on the editor icon to bring up an editor window. Follow
the instructions below to create a file, save it and view it in the navigator
window.
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Notice how the border of the editor window is a cyan color. This shows
you that the editor window is currently active. If it is not active, simply
click anywhere in the editor window to make it active.
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To enter text, simply start typing. Type your name or anything else you
like.
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When you are finished typing, save this file by using the menu. Select
File -> Save to save it.
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Since this is a new document, you will be prompted for a filename. Use
the name tutorial. After you have entered the name, you should
see that the top line of your editor window displays the filename including
the path.
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Close the file. To do this, simply close the editor window by using the
upper left button of the window. To do this, select it so the pull-down
window appears and drag down to (or select) Quit.
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Now look in the navigator window. Do you see the file you just created?
The reason you do not is that the Design Manager does not know you
created it. You need to update the navigator window. To do this, just as
before, select Update Window from the pop-up menu in the navigator
window. Now you should see the file object called
tutorial.
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You can rename the file by selecting the object, using the left mouse button,
and then using the pop-up menu item Edit -> Change -> Name.
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When the dialog box appears, enter a new name for the object. Just hit
return or click on the OK button to accept the name. Notice how
the name was changed in the navigator window. You don't have to use the
update window command when
Design Manager performs a task since
Design
Manager knows about the task performed. The editor, however, was not
a Design Manager command, but an external program.
Now, let's look at how the navigator window works. The bottom of the navigator
window has five buttons with arrows. These are described below:
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The down arrow is used to descend down a directory level. You first
select a folder object, then this arrow becomes ungrayed and you can descend
into the object's path.
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The up arrow is used to move up a level from the current directory.
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The right arrow is used to show information about a file.
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The left arrow moves you back a level from the actions the right
arrow initiates.
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The four arrows button is the go to button. By selecting this button,
you may enter a path where you would like to go to.
Let's use the navigator's buttons to move around the system.
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First, select your file if it is not already selected. Note how the right
arrow becomes ungrayed.
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Select the right arrow to view information about the file. The window
is empty. This is because a text file has no links in the Mentor database.
When you create schematics, however, they will have objects that do have
links to other objects, such as library components.
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Move back by using the left arrow.
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Move up to your home directory by using the up arrow. Notice how
the contents of the navigator window now show your home directory. The
folders are subdirectories, and the plain rectangles are files that Mentor
does not recognize.
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Move back into the Mentor directory by selecting the Mentor folder icon
and using the down arrow, or by double clicking on the Mentor folder.
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Use the arrows button to go to the temporary directory. Click on
the
arrows button (the ``go to'' button). A dialog box appears.
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This dialog box has a list of the last five directories that you have been
to during this session. You can either choose one of these or enter another
path. You should type in /tmp and hit carriage return.
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Now, you have moved to the temporary directory. There may be files here,
but you can ignore them. Move back to your Mentor directory by using the
go to button and highlighting the Mentor directory ($HOME/mgc) in the path
list and clicking on OK.
You now know how to navigate using Design Manager . You can also
view parts of your designs using the navigator, and you can do maintenance
on your database files, such as copying them, deleting them, and renaming
them by using the pop-up menus as discussed above. Select the appropriate
operation and you will be prompted for any information needed to complete
the desired operation.
Now let's start designing. The
next tutorial will demonstrated how to compile and simulate a VHDL
model.