Virtuoso Schematic Composer User Guide

Traversing the Design Hierarchy and Creating a Design Configuration View

About the Design Hierarchy

A design hierarchy comprises many levels of a single design. Each time you descend into the design hierarchy, you view a smaller division of the larger design in greater detail. Working in smaller divisions of a design lets you more effectively distribute work across multiple design engineers or groups.

A single instance in a hierarchical design typically represents multiple types of different models. For example, an ASIC may include an underlying gate-level schematic, a layout, or a number of different behavioral descriptions, or a model. A model card is a collection of

default parameters for a device. A model file is a collection of model cards. The specification of model cards is different based on the tool and the interface you use.

You have the flexibility to define the relationship between an instance and its various representations. You can descend into any particular lower-level design representation for examination or editing.