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.
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.
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.
breaking by property was only matching properties between circuits but
not within the same circuit, which is needed for correct symmetry
breaking. But the PropertyMatch() routine assumed that it is passed
one item from each circuit, leading to a segfault when running the
symmetry breaking within a single circuit. This has been fixed.
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).
black-box circuits, especially those coming from verilog netlists
where a pin does not need to be declared and is implicitly floating.
This prevents the need to have an explicit black-box entry for any
verilog module that may have an instance that does not declare all
the pin connections. Also corrected an error which causes mysterious
failures if a verilog netlist is read before a SPICE netlist,
because the former gets hashed case-sensitive and the latter changes
the hashing to case-insensitive. Modified to force the SPICE
netlist to be treated case-sensitive, which may cause errors, but
is consistent with the reverse order handling, and doesn't cause
unexplained errors.
symmetry of all elements in all symmetric partitions, rather than
(as previously done) all elements in each partition, before re-
running iterations to convergence. This solves the problem of
having a very large number of partitions with a few elements each
taking a long time to run.
automorphisms so that it arbitrarily assigns all pairs from
circuit1 and circuit2 at once rather than assigning one pair at
a time and rerunning to convergence. I'm not sure of the validity
of this, other than that I have never seen a circuit fail to match
after resolving automorphisms, leading me to believe that the way
the symmetry breaking is done is irrelevant.
long run-times even when there are no properties to check. Corrected
a problem with SPICE and verilog netlist reading which arbitrarily
replaces file extensions even when a file extension is given,
resulting in reading the wrong file.
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.
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.
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.
<col2_width>" to set the output format width, to avoid the fixed column
widths of 41 characters which can truncate long strings in the output
such as deep cell hierarchies. This command can be placed in the setup
script to widen the output columns to accomodate the result (to-do:
provide an "auto" mode to automatically determine the best width).
a "critical property". This lets a device define multiple critical
properties, all of which must match before additive properties can
be combined in the same device.
re-worked property command, "critical" properties must match
across devices so that all other properties can be combined as
specified (addition, parallel combination, or none). The code was
still based on the older notion of the "critical" property being
the one to add (and thus preventing multiple properties from being
added in different ways). This has now been fixed.
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).
type double before sorting (previously, property promotion was
being done after parallel sorting). Also, modified the verilog
file reading so that parameters and definitions that are numeric
are stored as numeric (not string) properties.
determine if a parameter is a floating-point number, integer, or
string, and set the parameter accordingly. Found an error in the
parameter comparison if the subcircuit definitions don't agree
on the type of parameter. Now all values are promoted to a single
type based on preference order (double, integer, string). Tested
on a verilog file with a primitive device type defined as a module
with its properties encoded as parameters. This successfully
matched against the SPICE primitive device.
be in any specific order since all ports are named. Also corrected
problem with pin names not using the same string matching function
as used for nets in general (which affects the ability to match
against different bus delimiters).
some problems stemming from comparing a case-sensitive netlist
against a case-insensitive one. Verilog netlist reading does
not yet have support for macros other than "`include", and it
does not yet have support for bit vectors constructed with
braces ({}).
calls "equate pins". This could fail because the routine that forces
uniqueness of pins was being called by the "compare" command but
outside of PinMatch. Fixed by duplicating the call to force uniqueness
of pins inside the "equate" function. Redundant calls should not
matter as uniqueness is resolved on the first call and subsequent calls
will need no further action.
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.
the default before comparing instances against each other for
serial/parallel combination. In particular, this avoids a
failure to serially combine a device with M = 1 vs. a device with
no M declared.
Netgen was incorrectly treating mismatched networks as a missing
set of parameters on whichever device had more property records,
resulting in misleading output.
attempt to resolve values by combining over serial chains was
attempting to access a property "S" in the component's master
record, which generally won't exist unless it has been explicitly
set in the netlist (which is unlikely since "S" is not a standard
SPICE/CDL parameter like "M").
unordered at the time of reaching reorderpins(). Pins will be
ordered arbitrarily (in the order of appearance in the linked
list), but netgen will not crash.
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.
about property errors to show up, not due to property errors, but
due to proxy pins being inserted in the middle of a device record.
However, the first one was fixed for the case of proxy pins being
added to circuit 1, but the same fix was not made for the opposite
case of proxy pins being added to circuit 2. This commit corrects
that omission.
to stop at the end of an instance record without properties, leading
to strange errors where netgen declares "There were property errors"
but does not print any errors (because there aren't any).
the serial combination routine was disabled so as not to post a
non-working version, since the parallel/serial property networks
are not analyzed. This should be completed soon.
making any subcircuit serializable by using the new command option
"property (device) serial|parallel enable|disable". Note that as
of this commit, serial device detection is enabled but serial
networks are not collapsed for matching, which will tend to lead
to property errors in serial devices until this code is added,
which should be in a day or two.
an instance property did not match the cell property type, as
long as the cell property types of the two compared cells matched.
Along with a recent change that left "M" as a type double during
SPICE netlist read-in, this caused "M" mismatches to be ignored,
because the double value was ignored and the integer value was
always zero.
avoid the problem where non-critical properties cause devices not
to match, resulting in apparent mismatches of matched devices.
The current behavior now prints a statement about each device.
However, the result is still somewhat ambiguous.
as failing on certain compilers. This undoubtedly reflects some
change in gcc or the OS setup, but since modern compilers should
be able to figure out for themselves when to inline a subroutine
(or not), the inline hint is somewhat arcane and unnecessary.
'ignore class', but removes instances of the specified class whose
pins are shorted together. Currently requires that all pins must
be shorted together.
Tim Edwards