Hi there - apologies for the late response - you're completely right! ADE L is, in essence, a slimmed down version of the former ADE XL which is now distributed under the name "ADE Assembler". In the video course, I chose to use ADE L because its interface is significantly simpler than Assembler's, and since learning to use Virtuoso is such a non-linear (and sometimes a bit frustrating) process, I wanted to make that path as easy as possible to follow. In our daily practice at my research group, practically everyone transitions from ADE L to Assembler for their second or third project, since it allows you to do more scalable simulations. For future videos I'm considering including this tool, but I can't make any guarantees as to if and when these are released. Thank you for your input, regardless, I'm glad that the videos were useful to you. :)

@@ThomasBooij Late response? I was impressed at the speed of your response :) I did not check out ADE Assembler... I looked at ADE Explorer. I will check ADE Assembler out. Again, thanks for the guidance.

You're absolutely right! The program (or well, the suite of programs) is called Cadence Virtuoso. That being said, we (in our research group) colloquially refer to it as "cadence" to differentiate it from other EDA tools from companies like Synopsis of Mentor Graphics.

I'd recommend having a look at GPDK, which is provided by Cadence itself at 45nm, 90nm and 180nm.

Hi Jerome! Really good point, the real THD definitely isn't 0% here! I don't have access to the simulation from here, but I expect that you might have to indicate what the fundamental frequency is somewhere. Otherwise, I'd expect that Cadence can't distinguish between the signal and its harmonics (esp. in the case of intermodulation, where the number of harmonics increases significantly). Hope this may help as a pointer for getting closer to that real THD-value.

@@ThomasBooij I see, very interesting. I think I managed to get a value for Total Harmonic Distortion by using the "THD" function in the Cadence calculator. This function asks for the fundamental frequency and returns a percentage for THD. Thanks Thomas

@@JeromeManzano-j7w Please increase the value in the harmonics from 1 to 10 (in the spectrum window), and then you will see the proper THD.

That's because 77 isn't a prime number; it's divisible by 1, 7, 11 and 77. 79 is the nearest prime number.

@@ThomasBooij Thanks! I think I understand. It’s still “relatively prime” to 1024 I think though right so it should technically still work?

@@vincentf502 Indeed, after thinking about it, you're absolutely correct. As long as M is relatively prime with 2^N this will work, which is indeed the case for M = 77. When M is a prime number itself, we have the immediate guarantee that there can be no common divisors. In other words, while there are many other values of M for which this will work, choosing a prime number guarantees that there will be no common divisors.

@@ThomasBooij if the denominator is 2^N, then the numerator just needs to be odd to be relatively prime. Any other constraint is over-restrictive.

Hi Alexander! Thanks for the nice comment! I'll consider it, but life's been pretty busy since making this series, so I can't make any promises. 😅 That being said, I'm very happy to see this video project is getting use from all over the world.

That has to be done by the system administrator; the person who installs Cadence. In my case, that was a person at my university, so I don't know how that is done. That being said, perhaps this link can be of help. eda.ncsu.edu/freepdk/freepdk45/

Hi 원종윤, thanks for watching my videos! I will be honest, I haven't worked with ADE explorer, but it seems very similar to ADE XL and ADE Assembler. In that case, you can set up "Design Variables" in the left hand column of the window and make sweeps by filling in variables in a start-step-stop format. For example, to sweep a variable from 1u to 10u in steps of 1u, you'd fill in "1u:1u:10u". You can also fill in arbitrary values by separating them by spaces, e.g. "1 4 5 6". Hope this helps!

​@@ThomasBooij Actually, I've been using design variables, but I was wondering if there would be any difference if I used parametric. Thank you for your help and Have a nice day!