I am working with cadence virtuoso layout editor. When I am using contact types, I am seeing that they are not made by pcell layout but they are done in different view name called "symbolic".
Can anybody please tell me what is this view and why it is used?
if possible give me some difference between a pcell layout and symbolic!
Please reply back if you don't understand the question at all!
The contact and via layers usually take up the lion's share of data in the final GDSII file - each structure includes at least 1 contact or via, even more in the majority of cases.
So I guess their symbolic's view purpose is to reduce the amount of data in the layout data base: instead of keeping a couple of corner-point and layer data (3 layers, each) for each individual contact or via, their symbolic view just stores the center point and the link to the symbol - this will reduce the amount of data quite a lot.
Of course this could also be done using pcells, but this probably has a historic reason: symbolic views were already available long before pcells were. And pcells need to store their parametric properties, hence more data.