parallel and series devices. This was a fairly major error
undermining the property sorting (the case where the same number
of devices are in parallel in both circuits and need to be sorted
by, e.g., width, prior to checking for matches).
pins for enabling parallel combinations, which could cause a crash.
Added a "-force" option to "equate pins" to allow pins to be matched
even on subcircuits that did not correctly match; this was done in
conjuction with an extra option to the "lvs" command "-noflatten="
to pass a list of cellname to not be flattened even if they do not
match. This is generally discouraged, as it prevents netgen from
resolving differences between layout and schematic hierarchy, but it
can be useful for checking that the hierarchy above a certain cell
is correct, given that if a subcell is really unmatched, then its
errors will keep propagating up the top level, making additional
errors hard to diagnose.
parallel if the same pins are no-connects. These were previously not
treated as parallel because each no-connect has a unique node number,
and cells were only considered as parallel if all pins connected to
the same node numbers. This avoids issues with long-running symmetry
breaking on standard cell designs due to cells like antenna taps or
any cell that is placed without connecting it up. To do: This
makes indistinguishable certain cases, e.g., N cells in circuit 1
with pin X open vs. N cells in circuit 2 with pin X all tied together.
This could be caught during property matching.
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.
file input so that pins occur first before nodes, as they do in a
SPICE netlist. Certain parts of the comparison code depend on pins
being first in the netlist, and reordering them when reading input
is easier than rewriting the rest of the code.
introduced in revision 150 can result in an incorrect result
reporting a bad match where the match is actually good (as proven
by running the full symmetry breaking on the same netlist).
Because the fast symmetry breaking is orders of magnitude faster
for large circuits, and because the false positive result appears
to be rare, I have introduced a command "symmetry" to switch
methods between fast and full. So fast symmetry breaking can be
run unless the result fails on symmetry breaking, in which case
the method can be switched to full to see if the problem is a
false positive or not. This is not an ideal solution, and some
investigation is needed to determine if there is a way to apply
fast symmetry breaking without encountering a false positive
error.
with the file number, so that it can get confused between libraries.
Also made a fix to coerce one cell class to be forced to be the
same in both circuits under some circumstances.
the top level circuits to be declared matching with no errors even
though the pins do not match. "proxy pins" are fine for subcells
to detect cases where one subcell has an unused pin and the matching
subcell does not declare it, but that should not be allowed on the
top level, as it cannot be known whether the pin is unused or not.
corrected the error statement so that it refers both to the (corrected)
left-hand side and also the portion of the right-hand side that cannot
be parsed as structural verilog.
that are not declared in the verilog netlist because they don't
connect to anything, and their presence is not required by verilog
syntax) and the printing of proxy pins created to act as placeholders
for those implicit pins. Also removed the pinting of the "disconnected
pin" messages for black-box modules (since by definition they have
disconnected pins, because black-box modules have no contents).
to include type CLASS_MODULE in the list of types to descend into,
since "module" (black-box) types need to be checked for pin
matching even if they have no contents. This allows two verilog
netlists to be compared against each other.
of the root name of the LHS net, and so would use the last root
name copied, which might have belonged to something entirely
different, or nothing at all.
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.
However, I have identified an issue that has not yet been resolved,
which is that there can be automorphisms that are potentially
broken by property matching. Currently, the automorphisms are
arbitrarily resolved, then properties are matched---and may fail
accordingly.
in an "include" statement in either SPICE or verilog. Modified pin
matching behavior to force cells in both netlists to be marked as
black-box entries if either one is marked as a black-box entry (this
may not be needed, but shouldn't do any harm, either).
Tim Edwards
Tim Edwards