The first question that may arise is what is ViVA? ViVA is the newest waveform. viewer from Cadence, first available in IC 6.1.2. It is the successor of Wavescan, available in older IC versions. ViVA stands for virtuoso Visualisation and Analysis.

The ViVA feature that we are interested is the fast viewing waveform, very useful when dealing with large amount of data, i.e. large files. It can be really annoying and almost impossible to plot graphics from large files. ViVA fast viewing waveform makes the task of plotting and analyzing this kind of graphics easier and faster.

The fast viewing waveform uses a new method to store the simulation data, the auxiliary RTSF (Rain Tree Storage Format) available since Cadence MMSIM 6.2.1. With this new method the data is stored in two files:

• One file is the usual simulation data file (tran.tran if a transient simulation is performed)
• The other file is like an index to be used by ViVA to enhance the data plotting (tran.tran.d file, which has only a small fraction of the tran.tran file size)

After setting up your circuit open ADE, set up the desired simulation and select the nets to be plotted/saved. Then in the ADE window, goto the Results menu and press the Printting/Plotting Options. In the window that pops-up, in the ViVA Mode separator activate the options XL/Fast Viewing Support has in the following picture.

Then in the ADE window, open the Outputs menu and press the Save All option. In the windows that pops-up , in the Output Format separator activate the options PSF/Use Fast Viewing Extensions like in the following picture.

After doing the steps above press the ADE Net List and Run button, and let the simulation run till it finishes. Then go to the Tools menu and press the Calculator option. The ViVA XL Calculator will open. The ViVA XL Calculator GUI is displayed in the following picture.

The next step is to press the next Open Browser button, or go to the Tools menu and select the Browser option. This will open the ViVA XL Results Browser. The first thing that must be done is to check if the Enable Fast Waveforms option is checked. This option is available in the ViVA XL Results Browser Options menu, has shown in the image bellow.

The last step is to plot the simulation results. To plot the graphics select the desired signals and choose the Plot Signal option of the pop-up menu, like it is shown in the following image.

If you performed the simulation without the Enable Fast Viewing Extensions check selected it is still possible to plot the simulation results using ViVA fast viewing waveform. In the $CDSDIR/tools.lnx86/dfII/bin directory its available a PSF to RTSF converter, the psf2rtsf. Just run this converter pointing to your simulation data file and the index file that ViVA fast viewing waveform needs is created.