The Destubifier

The Destubifier is a board level validation program written entirely in the Cadence SKILL language. In spite of the funny name (and all the really bad "stub" jokes), The Destubifier is a very serious program and will help you improve the quality of your designs. It has been in production use for nearly a year before it's public release and it has proven to be both useful and reliable for professional work.

Though the original goal was to find the infamous trace stubs that get lost and left in designs, the "best" way to go about finding all the stubs meant doing many other types of logical validation on the all the objects in the design.

If you have ever used the Cadence program "GLOSS" you can think of The Destubifier as GLOSS on steroids. GLOSS works on the idea of "grapics" since the end result of a layout tool is, of course, pictures of the artwork (i.e. Gerber, Braco, MDA, etc.). GLOSS tries to find problems by doing an analysis of the graphics. Many people complain that GLOSS is slow, and it is. This is particularly true if you are working in high enough resolutions to spot small but significant errors.

The Destubifier works in completely different manner and on a completely different theory; it perfroms logical analysis of all the objects within the design database so it is able to find problems that GLOSS could never see.

"Ya, Big Deal! -The last thing I need is another huge text listing of possible problems"

The Destubifier has an extensive GUI which not only classifies all the various types of logical flaws but it also allows you to zoom in on any given problem. In other words, it is "problem browser" was well as a problem finder.

"Well, So What? -I can now see the actual problems but not being able to fix them doesn't do me any good."

In The Destubifier user interface you can mark any flaw as "SELECTED" and then delete all of selected the problems at once. For example, if you (maybe blame someone else like the guy who built the part symbol) left an unconnected shape like the highlighted one in the center of this image:

(Click On Image To See Larger View)

You can just select the problematic shape via the provided checkbox on either in the left side "tree" or the right side "grid" in the main Destubifier display (changes line color to red to show it's selected).

(Click On Image To See Larger View)

Then you can simply hit the "Delete Selected" button on the lower left corner and after confirmation, The Destubifier will delete the offending shape.

Well, that's really more than enough of a sales pitch (for a free program ;-). If you want to know more about what The Destubifier can do and how it works, please read the documentation (link in left menu) and give the program a try. It is always interesting for people to take a "finished" design that is already in production and run The Destubifier on it. The result is usually disturbing.