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NETGEN

VERSION 1.5

NETGEN is a general-purpose netlist management system. It can read and write several netlist formats, including NTK (Caltech, CMU), WOMBAT (Berkeley), SIM (Berkeley), ACTEL (Actel Inc., Sunnyvale), and SPICE (Berkeley). In addition, a C-language embedded interface exists for specifying netlists directly. Please see the documentation file NETGEN.DOC

NETGEN was intended as an efficient specification language for hierarchical systems. Secondary features, such as testing isomorphism between two netlists, have been added over time. As netgen has primarily been used in its capacity as a netlist comparator, this has essentially become the primary useful feature of netgen.

Version 1.5 (September 2014) was created largely to allow the well-developed version 1.4 to be marked as the stable version. Bug fixes will continue on version 1.4 as version 1.5 continues development.

Version 1.4 (November 2007) is an effort to make netgen into an industry-standard LVS tool, handling device classes, device properties, hierarchy, and providing a sensible output making it easy to trace a problem to its exact source.

Version 1.2/1.3 (Mar. 2003) takes the original netgen and recasts it as a Tcl extension in the same manner as magic version 7.2 and IRSIM version 9.6, while retaining the option to compile the original, non-interpreter-based version(s). Under Tcl, all of the single-character commands have been recast as complete function names. The syntax has been changed to match Tcl generally-accepted syntactical norms. The X11 GUI has been scrapped and may eventually be replaced by a Tk GUI. Version 1.3 is a minor update on version 1.2 with GNU autoconf and a number of associated make-process fixes that were applied to magic and irsim.

REVISION HISTORY:

Revision 0: December 29, 2002 (first cut of port to Tcl). 1) New command-line interface with full-word commands. 2) The usual "toolscript" stuff with printf() functions passed to Tcl's "eval" function, support for and use of the TkCon console, compilation as a Tcl shared-object file. 3) New "make config" script to match magic's.

Revision 1: January 10 2003. 1) Improved "nodes" and "elements" commands so they return relevant information about specific points in the network. 2) Added position information to ".sim" file elements, so this can be used to trace back problems to a layout and/or schematic. 3) Fixed errors in the printing routines. 4) Improved some horribly inefficient code; speeds up some node printing commands and causes the "compare" command to become nearly instantaneous. 5) Removed regular-expression matching from the code. It is intended that Tcl's built-in regular expression matching will suffice, although it will be necessary to rewrite some functions to return Tcl lists instead of just dumping text to the screen. The main effect this has is that arrayed nodes in magic retain their names, simplifying the (intended) interface to magic.

Version 1.2, Revision 0: March 10 2003. 1) Fixed and extended the log file capability through the Tcl command "log". Includes the ability to turn screen echo on and off while logging. 2) Implemented Control-C interrupts during lengthy procedures, both for the TkCon console window and for the terminal-based mode. 3) Created the scripted command "lvs" to do what the standalone program "netcomp" used to do.

Version 1.3, Revision 0: November 13, 2004. 1) Implemented the GNU "autoconf" configure method in the same manner as magic-7.3 and irsim-9.7.

For further revision information, see the automatically-generated list of CVS check-in notes on http://opencircuitdesign.com/netgen/.

BUILDING NETGEN:

NETGEN version 1.5 uses the same "make" procedure as Magic version 8.1 and IRSIM version 9.7:

./configure make make install

Note: For FreeBSD, use 'gmake' instead.

Note: On MacOS (Big Sur) follow the following procedure. If you have installed xschem and magic already on MacOS then steps (1) and (2) can likely be skipped.

1) Build Tcl for X11

We are following the instructions from xschem (https://github.com/StefanSchippers/xschem/blob/master/README_MacOS.md).

We are using not opt but opt2 so that this Tcl does not interfere with tcl-tk from HomeBrew.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt2/tcl-tk  
make
make install

2) Build Tk for X11

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt2/tcl-tk \
--with-tcl=/usr/local/opt2/tcl-tk/lib --with-x \
--x-includes=/opt/X11/include --x-libraries=/opt/X11/lib  
make
make install

3) Build netgen

We need to provide this custom-built tcl-tk and suppress compilation errors.

./configure --with-tcl=/usr/local/opt2/tcl-tk/lib \
--with-tk=/usr/local/opt2/tcl-tk/lib \
--x-includes=/opt/X11/include \
--x-libraries=/opt/X11/lib \
CFLAGS=-Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration
make
make install

IN CASE OF FAILURE

Please contact me (tim@opencircuitdesign.com) to report compile-time and run-time errors. The website at

http://opencircuitdesign.com/netgen/

has complete information about compiling, configuring, and using netgen version 1.4.

RUNNING NETGEN UNDER TCL

The normal procedure for doing a netlist comparison (LVS) is the following:

  1. Build ".sim" files for the two netlists to be compared (e.g., run "exttosim" on the magic layout, and generate sim output on an xcircuit schematic.

  2. Run netgen.

  3. As of version 1.4, configuration of LVS is done by commands in a command file which is passed to the "lvs" command (see below). This file declares which device classes should be considered matching between two circuits, which subcircuits should be considered matching between two top-level circuits, and which ports of devices or subcircuits permute.

  4. As of version 1.2, netgen has a script-level procedure "lvs" which takes care of the above sequence of commands, as well as dumping the majority of the output to an output file, and reporting only the final analysis in the console window. The syntax of this command is:

    lvs <filename1> <filename2> [<setupfilename>] [<logfilename>]

    If "setupfilename" is not specified, then the default filename "setup.tcl" will be used. If this file does not exist, then a default setup is assumed.

    If "logfilename" is not specified, then the default filename "comp.out" will be used.

    "lvs" is equivalent to the following sequence of individual commands:

    readnet sim <filename1> readnet sim <filename2> source <setupfilename> compare <filename1> <filename2> run converge

  5. Interpreting the output:

    The feedback from netgen is still rather crude but improving in each generation. Illegal fragments are generated around areas where the netlists cannot be resolved. The worst matches will be listed at the top, which is usually the place to start looking.

    Connectivity of elements and nodes is much easier to trace now, with commands:

    nodes <element_name> <cellname> elements <node_name> <cellname>

    Where "cellname" is the filename (one of the two files loaded for comparison). The "elements" command prints all of the elements (transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc.) connected to a specific named node. The "nodes" command prints the node names for each pin of the specified element. For ".sim" netlists containing position information for each transistor, all transistor elements (and some non-transistor elements such as poly-poly capacitors and rpoly resistors extracted from magic) will have names like "n@45,376" indicating an n-type transistor at position x=45, y=376 on the layout. This naming convention permits tracing errors back to the layout and schematic.