substrate more than once for the same subcell, since the substrate
extraction method scans the entire plane area; this was making
large standard cell layouts extract very slowly, as every component
cell was causing the substrate search to be repeated.
extraction: Fixed a problem causing long extraction times, at
least some of which had to do with a poor string hash function
implementation. Fixed a huge problem in ext2spice, where the
node merge function was particularly poorly implemented, causing
exponentially increasing processing times with layout size.
Corrected a minor issue with ext2spice where arguments were
improperly specified, causing unnecessary error messages to be
issued. Fixed an error in the "load -dereference" command option,
which again caused unnecessary error messages to be issued.
Changed .gitignore to ignore Depend files, which are now regenerated
on every build.
extraction times, which is an incorrect units conversion of the
"step" parameter in the extract section. It was converting based
on the "lambda" parameter in the same section, which has to do with
the scaling of values in the output file, not the scale factor of
the database to be extracted, which is set by the current CIF output
scale. Once fixed, extraction times are minimized using the rule of
thumb mentioned in the techfile reference, which is 50 times the
minimum feature size. Also: Give the lengthy nature of extraction
on large designs no matter how well optimized, added a feature to
mark the progress of the extraction in increments of 5%. Does not
output progress for small cells that extract quickly.
development had been halted since it was first created back in April.
Version 8.2 is now the official development version, with the first
development push to create a Cairo graphics interface.
Tim Edwards