The .cdsinit file is used for loading any custom SKILL code, or preferences. By default (without doing anything else) it looks for it first in the Cadence IC installation (in <ICinstDir>/tools/dfII/local), then the current dir, then the home dir. As soon as a file is found, that is loaded, and the search stops. However, often people customize the .cdsinit to carry on searching for additional .cdsinit files.

Also, with IC61X, you can use the "Cadence Search File" mechanism to search for .cdsinit in other places.

Sometimes it is used to load necessary code for a third-party simulator, or for a design kit, or for many other purposes. You don't necessarily need one, but in some environments it will be absolutely necessary - it depends on what customization is needed in your environment.

It's virtually impossible to know what the impact of not having it is, without knowing what the expected setup in your environment is.

I'm pretty certain this is covered in the Design Framework Configuration Guide (I think that's what the manual is called) in the documentation. I'd have a good search and read through the documentation if I was you.

Regards,

Andrew.

CA,

No, most likely it's because there is some shared library not installed on the machine you're trying to run on, and spectre is failing to start.

Best way to check this is to go to the netlist directory, and look for the "runSimulation" script. Try running that by hand in a UNIX terminal, and seeing how it fails - that will most likely give you the explanation.

You may also want to run "checkSysConf" to find what patches are missing on the machine in question.

The envSetVal() call merely sets spectre to be the default simulator in ADE, which it is by default anyway, so in practice it's probably not doing anything (unless you have some site wide default to set it to something else). Either way, it won't affect this.

Regards,

Andrew.