Design Hierarchy Representations Overview

Adding blocks to Capital Logic Designer designs enables you to create a hierarchical representation of how designs are interconnected. This is achieved by associating designs to blocks, which are connected together using highways. You can also place unmated receptacle pins and unconnected device pins from associated child designs to the hierarchical block pins. This further enhances the bottom-up and top-down design flow enabling connectivity engineers to utilize detail from the child design and visualize it in the top level system view.

Design rule checks identify any connections between blocks that do not have a valid highway. Additional checks identify where a block is not associated with a design or the design is not part of an active build list. The integrity of the connectivity is also automatically subject to design rule checks, see Design Rule Checks.

You can navigate from a block to its associated design, and back again. While reporting on the highway lists all the shared connectivity between the connected blocks and designs. See Viewing Another Instance of an Object or Pin.

Figure 125: Example Blocks and Highway Hierarchy

Figure 125 shows a design comprising three blocks, connected by two highways, referencing three designs. You can use the View Related Items functionality to view the design that the block is associated with (see Viewing Another Instance of an Object or Pin).

A block appears both graphically on a diagram and also under a Blocks node in the Design Browser. Any highways that connect with the block are also listed under the same node.

Blocks on diagrams can be sliced, simplifying diagram modifications and making diagrams easier to understand. See Slicing Objects.

Copy and pasting a block creates a new block. Using the key combination Ctrl+Shift+V creates a new instance of the block. This method results in the copies of the block retaining the same name as the original block. See “Copying and Pasting an Object in a Diagram” in the Capital Design Tools - Common Functions User Guide.

Reporting on highways lists all the shared connectivity between the connected blocks and designs. See also Reports.

The appearance of blocks can be styled. See the Diagram Styling User Guide for style sets and how to edit them. There are two default attributes for block styling:

• Name

    The name of the block.
  

• Associated Design

    The design which the block has been associated with.
  
    Note 
      From 2013.1 the defaultStyle.xml
        includes new shape parameters to support hierarchical blocks in Capital Logic Designer.
        If you copy your pre-v2013.1 defaultStyle.xml file
        to the new installation, you must manually add the sections needed to represent blocks
        in your designs to ensure that blocks are styled correctly.
  

Parent Topic:

Design Hierarchy Representations

Capital Logic Designer User Guide, 2512

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