ago (and may have been, but only under limited circumstances). Do
to several errors, using "-noflatten" on the command line and using
"flatten prohibit" in a script would not prevent cells from being
flattened; the "-noflatten" list needed to be used to call "flatten
prohibit", and "flatten prohibit" needed to be fixed to flag the
specified cell instead of the top level cell where it exists.
forced flattening to be done whenever any pin mismatch occurred,
which undermined the whole proxy pin method. With the proxy pins
fixed, reinstated the method of avoiding flattening when pin
issues can be trivially corrected. Also: Added output to the
pin matching for one mismatch case that was being missed.
such a zero-ohm resistors or zero-volt sources during the pre-match
phase, since the list of nodes gets changed by merging nets across
the removed devices. Otherwise, the node-name cache gets
corrupted and random LVS errors occur.
while back, shorted pins were moved into contiguous positions.
When that method was discovered to cause matching issues, it was
abandoned with a note that doing so might have unintended
consequences because other code might depend on the shorted pins
being contiguous. Such a case was just found, and corrected.
However, it was also found that shorted pins were still not
completely handled correctly in MatchPins(); a solution was
found that adds such pins to the "permutes" list (which needs to
be done if the shorted pins are to be correctly handled in any
higher level of the hierarchy, if there is one), and the
"permutes" list is then checked by MatchPins() to determine if
pins match because they belong to the same group of shorted
pins.
the removal of zero-valued devices between ports on the top level
(from version 254 they are ignored for levels under the top to
prevent port order from getting scrambled). An invalid check was
being made to determine if the cells being compared were the top
of the compare queue. This has been fixed.
devices between two ports is ignored for top-level cells, because
the scrambled ports won't affect anything in that case, and the
error will be reported as a port error, as it should.
so that they are *not* removed to make a better match if they are
shorting across two ports. If removed, then the port lists will
get screwed up. It is better to let the subcircuits fail matching.
Then, after the mismatched subcircuits are flattened, if the zero-
valued resistor or voltage source no longer connects two ports, it
can be safely removed to make a better match.
when they are shorted, because doing so is scrambling the pin
order of cells with respect to the instance calls to the cell.
Not sure if there is any code that relies on shorted pins being
adjacent, though.
then flattening instances of that cell can cause a port of the parent
cell connected to the disconnected port of the child cell to itself
become disconnected. If the parent port is not changed to show the
disconnected state, then pin mismatch can occur if the netlist being
matched didn't have the same flattened subcell. This condition is
now detected and handled correctly.
request #59 ("Pin match"). Because the pull request has rather
sweeping modifications, I am doing this in two steps. The change
that most breaks with existing comparison methods is in the
PinMatch() routine in netcmp.c, where the method of generating
proxy pins has been removed. There are specific cases for which
the proxy pin method exists, although these were coping with
issues arising from extraction in magic which have been dealt
with to some extend. Possibly the proxy pin method is no longer
needed. So the PinMatch() changes will be done in a second
commit where it's easier to revert or modify the changes without
affecting the modifications from this commit.
command option "flatten prohibit" (or "flatten deny") to prevent
a subcell from being flattened at any time during the compare
process. Previously, the "-noflatten" option for the "lvs"
script had been used to prevent flattening during initial
pre-match, but if the circuit passed the prematch phase and
subcells were mismatched, they would be flattened regardless of
whether or not they were listed by the "-noflatten" option. This
also codifies a way to prevent subcells from being flattened in
the setup file rather than in the "lvs" command line. Also:
Found and fixed a bug that prevents the use of "-noflatten=" with
a cell name or list of cell names instead of a filename.
even when the opposing netlist has a black-box entry for the same
cell. The black-box entry can't be flattened, so this just
results in the cell mysteriously disappearing from one side.
to a single net (as can be done with assignments in verilog or with
zero-voltage sources or zero-value resistors in SPICE). Corrected
an error in the SPICE netlist reader that prevented the proper use
of zero-voltage sources as net splitters.
speed up the time needed to flatten an instance, and add clarity to the
output by specifying the file number for each cell name being modified
during the pre-match stage.
routine does not have an exact equivalent in PrematchLists() and
needs to be run beforehand. This fix keeps FlattenUnmatched()
from being run on all cells at the beginning and restricts it
to being run on the contents of individual cells during matching,
after checking if either of the cells is a black-box. Avoiding
flattening contents of one side when the other is a black-box
(or simply doesn't contain any subcircuits or devices) prevents
unnecessary flattening of cells that will never get compared.
of multiple devices during flattening, that will skip over a node
record at the end of a subcircuit call being flattened and therefore
remove it from the netlist.
run to the end of the list of circuit elements. Also corrected
another issue caused by the flag to denote multiple no-connect pins,
which can be on an instance pin and so cannot share the data from the
instance record.
records, which were being ignored. This really only applies to
parallel subcircuits being flattened. To flatten correctly requires
that any circuit with N property records must be flattened into the
parent at least N times. To do: Must look for M > 1 records in the
properties and flatten (M - 1) additional times.
devices in parallel with unconnected pins would be confused with
N devices in parallel with those pins all tied together. This is
treated as a property error.
to go into an infinite loop and fill memory until it crashes, due
to a complete pin mismatch between devices causing one device to
have its pins removed and replaced with proxy pins.
was running through the entire object linked list to find the
predecessor of a record that it had already found. Solved by simply
keeping track of the predecessor record.
from 200 to 1024. Probably this should be dynamically allocated
and expanded as needed, as it is holding names that are of
increasing length as a hierarchy is descended and the instance
prefixes appended to the name.
be removed because they do not match pins on the other cell being
compared, are marked with a different number (-2) than the usual
(-1). CleanupPins then only removes those pins that are marked,
rather than all disconnected pins.
handle verilog syntax. Also: Added SPICE voltage and current
sources as separate classes (as opposed to being converted to
subcircuits, which was how they were previously handled). That
allowed voltage sources to be checked for zero value and removed
by shorting the ends together, as was being done for zero value
resistors (note that like zero-value resistors, removal is only
done if removing the component makes a better match than leaving
it in). In particular, yosys has SPICE netlist output that
converts equality assignments ("assign a = b") into zero-value
voltage sources, so these components need to be treated as
non-physical elements.
the possibility that a device (e.g., resistor or capacitor) may
not be a semiconductor device (in other words, a parasitic or
ideal device), and therefore uses "value" but not width and
length, and therefore "value" is a critical property to merge
both in series and parallel. Corrected the series/parallel
network optimization to prevent it from setting both M and S
records > 1 on the same device (which is ambiguous). To try
to get number of devices to match, where there are both series
and parallel devices, they will be merged across the critical
property early (before property matching).
time warnings and errors. Removed the "-lazy" option from the
Tcl load command, which is not needed when the stubs libraries
are compiled in correctly, and which causes issues on some
systems (e.g., Mac OS). Thanks to Matt Guthaus for the patch.
for subcircuits (.subckt ... .ends pair with cellname and pin names
and pin order, but no contents) are automatically treated as black-
box circuits if found and if the "-blackbox" option is passed to the
"lvs" (scripted) command. The "equate pins" command can be used
outside of a comparison to force two circuits (black-box or
otherwise) to be matched by pin name (if not a black-box circuit,
then this is a provisional name match, as a circuit comparison will
order based on connectivity first, not pin names). So two sets of
black-box circuit libraries can be used as long as their pin names
match. One hack added to ignore the "!" at the end of global names
when comparing pin names for matching. Otherwise, pin names must
compare by case-insensitive string match.
include calculations of effective width due to the addition of
width of multiple device instances in parallel. The original
behavior of splitting all "M=" devices into individual instances
has been effectively inverted, instead combining all parallel
devices of the same class into one, with multiple property
records for devices with non-matching properties (e.g., width,
length, etc.). Property matching combines devices with different
"critical properties" (e.g., FET gate width) if these are defined
in the setup using the "property merge" command.
Not yet done: Matching of multiple property records when
critial properties are not defined, handling of critical properties
that combine in parallel instead of simple addition, handling of
devices that combine in series, and the combination of non-critical
properties (e.g., source and drain area, although these are usually
removed from matching).
based on properties that can be traded with number of devices,
such as MOSFET width, by merging. This initial implementation
is somewhat limited, only dealing with properties that merge
by summing. Only devices that do not match at all in the other
circuit will be considered for merging. The feature includes
a command option "property ... merge ..." that allows control
over which devices can and cannot be merged.
variables to iterate over hash table contents. This led to the
inability to nest hash table iterators. Fixed by defining a
wrapper structure that holds the actual hash table plus the size
and iterator indexes. Not only does this solve the nesting
problem, but it also avoids the need to pass the hash table size
on every call, and that reduces the number of ways a hash table
subroutine can go wrong (e.g., cannot access the table out of
bounds simply by passing a size that is larger than was used to
initialize the table).
R. Timothy Edwards
D. Mitch Bailey