- name compare of net names wasn't always case insensitive
- tentative evaluation was sometimes continued even after
a contradiction was detected because the return codes
of different edge examinations were not combined correctly.
Breakout cells can be specified to shortcut hierarchy
evaluation for some cells. This allows treating SRAM cells
as isolated entities - specifically when it comes to extracting
devices.
The solution is to take intruder instances from as
far as possible in the hierarchy. This provides a
performance improvement in some cases, specifically
if this leads to compression of contexts.
Fake pins: pins that happen because something connects to a cell at an
unexpected position. Such a pin is difficult to find. The solution is
to keep those nets and nur purge them so these nets can be identified
in the layout.
Here: is_floating? will be true only if there are no pins. Hence
nets with pins are not removed. is_passive is introduced for nets -
passive nets are such that don't have elements, but a pin.
Circuits are purged if they only have passive nets.
Consistent behavior for file paths for images too.
Plus: image paths are not kept as absolute paths
inside the session.
This makes regeneration of images stable.
The problem was that with the floating test case, the
ambiguity resolution sometimes assigned the wrong pins
and floating pins/connected pins were swapped.
One option is to make the ambiguity resolver consider
the pin connection state when tenatively evaluating
nodes.
Another option is to put more emphasis on net names
and use them for ambiguity resolution. This has helped
here.
1.) is_floating is now only true if there is no device
and no subcircuit on a net. This means we only purge
nets if they are really floating. So far we purged
nets without pins which lead to the mismatch:
Before purge:
Layout: (net) <--> DEVICE.TERMINAL
Schematic: PIN <--> DEVICE.TERMINAL
After purge:
Layout: (null) <--> DEVICE.TERMINAL
Schematic: PIN <--> DEVICE.TERMINAL
(null does not match any net)
2.) circuit pin matching was a bit picky. Only when
one circuit did not have pins, matching was sloppy.
In real cases however, circuits may have unconnected
pins:
- top level pins without a counterpart (no label)
- subcircuits pins which are not used
We catch both cases by refining the match: if a pin
is not used, it does not need to match against
any other pin. It's reported as "matching against null"
though.
Rerun LVS: a button is provided which allows re-running
the LVS or netlist extraction from the netlist browser.
TODO: a generic concept for triggering the generators
"Partial LVS" is a feature where it's possible to
select a layout subcell - running LVS then will only
compare against the corresponding schematic subcell, not
the whole tree. The magic is done by "align" which will
remove the upper hierarchy part.
This implementation is pretty simplistic and
applies "M" the following way:
* R: R(final) = R/M
* L: L(final) = L/M
* C: C(final) = C*M
* M: W(final) = W*M
* D: A(final) = A*M
* Q: AE(final) = AE*M
The other parameters (specifically the other
geometry parameters) are not scaled yet.
1.) The ExpressionContext class is a mapping of tl::Eval
and allows providing a variable context for the LQ.
Expression class is derived from ExpressionContext now.
2.) The variable lookup has been changed so that variables
can be modified even if they come from a parent context.
3.) LayoutQuery and iterator has been given an argument to
supply the context
Devices: try to pair unmatching ones similar to subcircuits
Don't sort devices by the device name but by class name
Show the device parameters for netlist devices (same as
for netlist browser)
Plus: added some missing files
Implementation details:
* scaling factor was introduced in DeviceExtractor::extract
* for easy implementation this is available in "sdbu"
* "sdbu" is made available in GSI
* to test this, the db::compare_netlist had to be enhanced to
exactly check device parameters
* enhancement of LVS script framework and doc updates
1. Errors in coerce_parameters are now shown as
red label + warning icon in the parameters dialog
2. Errors during produce are always logged now
Plus: the scroll bars of the PCell parameters page
don't jump back on "Apply".
- global pins have been generated for device cells too and lead
to implicit pins which may not be desired. The original problem
was how to make abstract circuits comparable. This has to be
solved differently.
- Circuit boundaries are good for displaying the boxes for
abstract circuits
General topic: abstracts and swappable pins.
Issue: we work bottom up and assign pins. This is the
basis for net graph building. But swappable means those
pins can change. The compare works fine, but debugging
output is strange: as the pin assigned is fixed, the nets
found to be attached to a circuit might not fit any
proposed pin pair (which does not contain swapping).
The problem gets worse with abstracts.
The enhancements are
- Such cases generate only warnings in the browser
and the message says swapping might be the case
- Floating nets are treated differently. This should
lead to a better performance for abstracts/black boxes,
but in case of disconnected pins (due to wire errors),
floating nets happen to create mismatches in the nets above.
- Net graph building does not consider swappable nets. In
case of two swappable pins this wouldn't be an issue, but
for more than two this would create ambiguities and
prevent topological matching.
Plus: Debug output option for net graph
Tests updated
- For unattached subcircuit pins no error should be reported
- For abstract nets, graph propagation through subcircuit pins isn't attempted.
Abstract nets are only dummy-associated currently.
Reason: when a circuit does not have pins and is top level,
but the reference has pins, the reference pins are regarded
to match against (nil). This case has to be reported properly,
otherwise the model can't be built consistently.
- LVS DSL debugging, enhancements
- Allow polygons with holes in L2N
- Spice Reader: was creating too many class objects
- Device class categorizer: allow associating A->C,B-C
- ...
Previous: empty layers occupied a special layer in the DSS
But what when empty layers are required as outputs?
ONE layer isn't good -> would overwrite the layer and it's
no longer empty for others.
So we need to keep the layers separate.