Hello, I am noticing an issue that seems to have arised from nowhere. I've noticed that when I am placing instances of modules, they are being named <cellname>_# rather than simple x#. This is causing a cascading error and I would like to understand why this happened and how i can fix it. For example, looking at a copy of my SR latch, it can be seen that two of my inverters are named x4 and x1, however, the left most one I just replaced is being named Inverter_0. This seems to be happening for every cell/model I place

I don't understand why this would be an error; it's just a matter of how instances are named. The traditional and default naming convention used by magic is to name an instance as <cellname>_<number> (unless arrayed, which is slightly different). Any instance can be renamed using the

identify

command (e.g., select the instance and type

identify x14

. Note that subcircuits will still get a preceding

x

when written to SPICE, so an instance named

x14

will be component

xx14

in SPICE. Cell names in GDS cannot begin with a digit (at least in some versions of the GDS spec), so the instance cannot be named simply

14

. If you seed a layout from a schematic netlist using the

import SPICE

menu function, then cell instances will automatically be named according to what's in the schematic (which is probably how your instances got the names

x1

, etc., to begin with). You can re-import a schematic netlist such that if the netlist has gained or changed components, the layout will get updated with the revised components (I'm sure there are lots of ways to confuse the routine that tries to figure out how the netlist has changed, so make a backup copy first!). If you are just making a simple change and/or don't trust the netlist re-import mechanism, then manually changing the instance names with the

identify

command is the way to go.