Anita,
Thank you for your insight. You did an amazing thing. I hope I expressed in the article that although speaking the language in the home is not an absolute requirement, it just helps a great deal. It appears that you were able to replace German in the home with full time German school.

Anita and Johannes,
Since I know you both personally (so much for the world wide web cyberspace thing, eh?) let me know if you would like me to introduce you.

Nice post – glad I found your blog. This is really interesting stuff, my wife and I both speak German (but don’t have kids yet). We have been wondering for a while how to best approach the bilinguall issue and you have some excellent points. For German, there is a school run by the German government in Mountain View, which we are looking at. But that might be too much German and not enough english.

I have no experience with C++ PCells. C++ PCells are not at all popular. In fact, you are the first person I have heard of who has tried them.

I have two suggestions for you. Get the Ciranova PyCells, and write your PCells in Python. PyCells are regularly used with Virtuoso, so you will have no problem there.

If you still want to use C++ PCells, have a look at the CiraNova PyCell documentation. It might give you a clue that will help you get your C++ PCells running.

Keep me posted. I am interested to hear what happens.

Currently, I am a severely stuck with a practical issue trying to get an OpenAccess plugin working from Cadence Virtuoso.
From the point of view of OpenAccess, everything is very well documented and clear. However, it is not from the point of Cadence. It is also not clear if we maybe need the Cadence Integrator’s Toolkit (ITK), or not.

-We have an Openaccess plugin file (.plg extension, see opnPCell.plg herunder) which was placed in the path /Cadence/IC6.1/oa_v22.04.028/data/plugins/

-We have the C++ code “opnPcell.cpp” (see below) which was compiled into a shared library “libopnPcell.so” and placed in the path /Cadence/IC6.1/oa_v22.04.028/lib/linux_rhel30_gcc411_32/opt

These come from the standard OpenAccess 2.2 release.

Now my question is : how do I tell Cadence Virtuoso (6.1.3) to “start up” the
plugin when instantiating a PCell, i.e. to call the getClassObject method of “libopnPcell.so” and instantiate an object of class “opnPcell” ?
Do we need the Cadence ITK ?

I cannot find any documentation about this on Sourcelink or newsgroups.
Could you give us a hint on how to proceed?

Best regards.

————————– file opnPCell.plg ————–

—————————file opnPcell.cpp —————-
#include “opnPcell.h”

Factory opnPcell::factory(”opnPcell”);

const oaString opnPcellMsgs[] = {
“Invalid value for the ‘%s’ parameter supplied.”
};

long
getClassObject(const char *classID,
const Guid &interfaceID,
void **ptr)
{
return FactoryBase::getClassObject(classID, interfaceID, ptr);
}

oaPcellDef *
opnPcell::getPcellDef()
{
return new opnPcellDef(this);
}

void
opnPcell::onUnbind(oaDesign *design,
oaPcellDef *pcellDef)
{
delete pcellDef;
}

void
opnPcell::onEval(oaDesign *design,
oaPcellDef *pcellDef)
{
oaParam param;
oaParamArray params;

design->getParams(params);

oaUInt4 dbu = 1000;
oaInt4 w;
oaInt4 l;

if (params.find(”width”, param)) {
if (param.getType() == oacDoubleParamType) {
w = oaInt4(param.getDoubleVal() * dbu);
}
}

if (w < 1) {
throw opnError(opnParamInvalid, (const char *) "width");
};

if (params.find("length", param)) {
if (param.getType() == oacDoubleParamType) {
l = oaInt4(param.getDoubleVal() * dbu);
}
}

if (l getTopBlock();

if (!bk) {
bk = oaBlock::create(design);
}

oaRect *box1 = oaRect::create(bk, 2, 1, oaBox(-l, -w, l, w));

// Double w,l and swap
w *= 2;
l *= 2;
oaRect *box2 = oaRect::create(bk, 3, 1, oaBox(-w, -l, w, l));
}

oaUInt4
opnPcell::calcDiskSize(oaPcellDef *pcellDef) const
{
return 0;
}

opnPcellDef::opnPcellDef(IPcell *pcell)
: oaPcellDef(pcell)
{
data = “MyopnPcellData”;
}

inline
opnException::opnException(oaUInt4 msgIdIn)
: oaException(msgIdIn)
{
}

const oaString &
opnException::getFormatString() const
{
return opnPcellMsgs[msgId];
}

opnError::opnError(oaUInt4 msgIdIn,
…)
: opnException(msgIdIn)
{
va_list args;

va_start(args, msgIdIn);
format(args);
va_end(args);
}