[Xcircuit-dev] insertparam without tcl

[R. Timothy Edwards]

(From Svenn:)

> I have a problem with the interface, even the old one. On one side the concept 
> of xcircuit fits the need for quick circuit drawing for presentation purpose, 
> and at the same time that circuit is ready for simulation. On the other side, 
> xcircuit is not quite as friendly to large projects as I would like to see. 
> The new tutorial 3 from Tim make things a bit easier, and xcircuit has 
> developed a lot regarding symbol creation for existing spice netlists etc.

I never used xcircuit on a large project until earlier this year, so it should
not be surprising that the capabilities are under-developed.  I have in mind
a number of improvements for generating symbols.  More problematic, though, is
that the handling of project symbol libraries and multiple files is very
fragile and easy to break if you don't follow the methods from Tutorial 3
pretty closely.

> So far I haven't found any open source schematic capture that works better and 
> faster for me than xcircuit, but I know I will need some of the options that 
> cadence composer offer: Different cellviews tied to a symbol with vhdl, 
> spectre, verilog etc. netlisting capabilities.

Since MultiGiG is starting to edge toward real products and volume chip
production, we've bought all the standard Cadence and Mentor Graphics
tools.  This is causing me to have less and less opportunity to develop
xcircuit and the rest of the open source tool suite.  One of our main
problems recently is that while the circuit designers here would much
rather look at schematics in xcircuit, any circuit in xcircuit has to be
duplicated by hand into Composer, or else it breaks the Cadence tool flow.
Which is why I was happy to see some discussion about EDIF and DFII.

But, chip testing is what's on the front burner today, so it's back to
the lab for me. . .

					---Tim

+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim)   | email: tim.edwards at multigig.com     |
| MultiGiG, Inc.                 | web:   http://www.multigig.com      |
| 100 Enterprise Way, Suite A-3  | phone: (831) 621-3283               |
| Scotts Valley, CA 95066        | cell:  (240) 401-0616               |
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+