I have got my pdk installed in the right directory, then why am I getting this error upon running xschem

It outputs nothing, but i am sure that my pdk is installed in /usr/local/share/pdk

It’s not an error then - just a warning message. If you’re not seeing the xschem window, that’s a different problem.

Why does the xchemrc file need to know the pdk location anyway, because we can always get the models from the pdk by just opening them in xschem itself.

It might have to do with the way xschem stores the symbol references. If the symbols aren’t on your

XSCHEM_LIBRARY_PATH

, the symbols maybe stored as absolute references instead of relative references. This makes your design unportable.