First Look with Pin Explorer

1. Press the Exlpore Pins Button 

We will see the pins partBuilder extracted from the IBIS FILE

2. The Pin Explorer pops up

we can see an ALL_POWER_PINS Pin group and we press the '+' to collapse it

3. Next we collapse the ALL_SIGNAL_PINS PIN_GROUP

Improvements are on the way to make the expand/collapse experience better.

4. Both PIN_GROUPS are collapsed 

we see it reports

 46 pins in the ALL_POWER_PINS group

and 

50 pins in the ALL_SIGNAL_PINS group

5. Now we enter a PIN_NAME match filter

we enter 

^A[15:0],DQS,^CK,#$

This is 4 pin matches separated by commas

the first one is

^A[15:0]

This means look for pins 

A15..A0 The '^A' means the pin_name must "START_WITH" A

so the BA[2:0] pins will not be displayed

The next one is

DQS and will show any pin that contains DSQ so it finds UDQS and LDQS

The next one is:

^CK 

which will show any pin that STARTS with CK (CK, CKE and CK#)

The last one is 

#$  

the Dollar sign means ENDS_WITH so this will show us any pin that ENDS with a '#'

This finds all the pins that we want to change using the signal_rename rules

6. Now we click on the Pin Rename Rules Tab

7. Here we enter the Rename Rules

We enter:

A12:A12_BC_N,A10:A10_AP,DQS$:DQS_P,CK$:CK_P,#$:_N

This is comma separated list of  MATCH:REPLACE rules

A12:A12_BC_N --This will rename pin A12 to A12_BC_N as it appears in the datasheet (the IBIS model stripped off the _BC_N)

A10:A10_AP     --This will rename pin A10 to A10_AP as it appears in the datasheet...

DQS$:DQS_P    --This will change the DQS in any pin  ending in DQS with DQS_P (it will change UDQS to UDQS_P and LDQS to LDQS_P) 

CK$:CK_P          --This will change the CK in any pin ending in CK to CK_P (it will only change CK to CK_P)

#$:_N                --This will change  the # in any pin ENDING_WITH '#" to '_N' 

                               (it will change CK#,LDQS#,UDQS#,CAS#,RAS#,CS#,RST# to CK_N,LDQS_N,....RST_N)

Be careful here, it is easy to miss the ':' between the MATCH:REPLACE and type a comma instead (which I did several times creating this tutorial!)

Another way to accomplish the same thing...

We can put these MATCH:REPLACE rules in a file called rename_rules.txt and then enter rename_rules.txt into the SIG_RENAME_RULES Entry

Instead of separating the rules by commas, we can put each one on its own line

the tricky one is the #$:_N rule because by default partBuilder will ignore lines starting with '#' when reading from a file.

To work around this, in the rename_rules file we must escape the '#' with a backslash like this

\#$:_N

8. Re-Read the Pin Report (which will apply rename rules)

we click the Read Pin Report button which will re-read the pin report and apply our sig-rename rules

9. We examine what the rename rules did for us

Now the ORIG_NAME column is populated for any pin we changed

we can see that the new 

A12_BC_N was A12

A10_AP was A10

UDQS_N was UDQS#

UDQS_P was UDQS

LDQS_P was LDQS

LDQS_N was LDQS#

CK_P was CK

CK_N was CK#

The CS#,RAS#,CAS#,RST# and WE# pins dissappeared from the display becuase the pinMatch no ends with the '#' character

Another benefit of our name changes...The DIFF_PAIR_MATE column is now populated since 

LDQS_P and LDQS_N are mates

UDQS_P and UDQS_N are mates

and 

CK_P and CK_N are mates

We will see that this will make our job of placing pins eaiser since we only have to place the '_P' member of the diff_pair