Waveform Style Management (Digital Waveform Viewer)

Frozen Content

Modified by Admin on Nov 6, 2013

Control over how captured signal information is presented in the Digital Waveform Viewer is taken to the next level in this release, with the waveform style system enhanced to provide a number of additional built-in styles and allowing you to set styles automatically when configuring a Logic Analyzer instrument.

Built-in Styles

The new styles – 12 in all – can be found in the Wave Styles region, on the Wave – General page of the Preferences dialog (DXP»Preferences).

12 new built-in wave styles help to further streamline configuration of signal display!

You can change the name and/or color assignment(s) of any of the new built-in styles. You can also remove them as well. Should you need to revert the built-in styles back to their original state, or reinstate them after removal, simply click on the Reset Styles button.

Using the Reset Styles button will cause any additional styles that you have defined to be discarded, leaving only the 12 built-in styles, as well as Clock and Default.

Style Assignment

Assignment of styles to signals is performed as part of a logic analyzer instrument's configuration, using the associated Configure (Logic Analyzer) dialog. As before, the signals within a signal set can be associated with a specific wave style, which will be used when displaying the generated waveforms in the Digital Waveform Viewer. Simply click twice within the Style field for a signal to access a drop-down list of all currently available styles (those defined in the Preferences dialog). The built-in styles will be listed for use as part of this list.

Manual assignment of waveform styles to signals is carried out in the established manner, only this time, the pre-configured, built-in stylwes will be available from the drop-down list.

Doing anything manually takes time and is always an unhealthy diversion from the main job of innovative design. No matter, in the Summer 09 release of Altium Designer, assignment of wave styles to signals can now be carried out literally at the 'touch of a button'.

Simply ensure the styles you want to use are defined as required on the Wave – General page of the Preferences dialog then, from within the Configure (Logic Analyzer) dialog, simply click on the Auto Colors button. Starting from the signal at the top of the first defined signal set and working down, the software will assign each of the wave styles in turn - in the order they appear after the Clock and Default styles.

Assign your defined wave styles to your list of defined signals - across all signal sets - with a single click!

There are several things to note:

The Clock and Default wave styles are not used as part of the auto style assignment.

If there are more signals than defined styles (where defined styles includes built-in and any additional styles), the style assignment will simply repeat itself, starting from the first assignable wave style.

If you subsequently define new wave styles in the Preferences dialog, you can use the Auto Colors button to quickly reassign styles.