@User: I understand that magic wants to match the timestamp between an instance of the cell and the cell itself. What I'm not sure of is why it is trying to change the timestamp of the cell itself instead of updating the instance. I have an intention to replace this with a checksum instead of a timestamp, which makes a lot more sense to me, but I haven't done this yet. One thing that could be causing problems is that the PDK creates full and abstract views of the standard cells, and since these are built at different times, they have different timestamps. I can try modifying the PDK installer so that it generates a timestamp equal to the creation date of the original GDS.

Could the fact there are both full and abstract views be causing problems in the case where you're manually instantiating the

.mag

standard cell directly though, as in my case?