[Xcircuit-dev] Time for a rewrite of the netlisting?

[R. Timothy Edwards]

Dear Svenn,

> I started looking into the netlist.c file in order to see how difficult it is 
> to write a new back-end to xcircuit. It does not look very simple. How 
> difficut would it be to have xcircuit load a tcl-script which access the 
> internal data-structure and create the netlist. This way it is no longer 
> nescessary to recompile xcircuit for each added netlist format.

Actually, that part is already done.  Load a schematic and do "netlist
make".  Now, "all" you have to do is to parse that mess.  I did that
once before with the Python interface, but never transferred the code
over to Tcl.  In theory, though, everything needed for the netlist is
in that list result somewhere:  all the ports, all the parameters, all
the text formatting strings.

On the other hand, an alternative method is just to define the format
inside the symbols.  A few lines of code need to be added to the Tcl
"netlist" command code in tclxcircuit.c to make this work.

> I was thinking about writing a vhdl backend, but it looks pretty impossible.

I was thinking about writing an EDIF backend, an equally daunting task.

					Regards,
					Tim

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| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: tim.edwards at multigig.com     |
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