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Magic Mailing List |
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From: Erwin J. Prinz, Ph.D. (rzfm20 AT email DOT sps.mot.com) Date: Mon May 19 2003 - 11:03:40 EDT
Friends of Magic: We have been using Magic 7.2 for a reasonably big layout project (test structures for 90nm non-volatile memory development). We realize it is "alpha" code but the fastest way to find bugs is to use a tool. Overall it has been working very well. We found the following two minor issues, which I would like to resolve. Please let me know if you have already done work on them: 1. Every once in a while (rarely) a .mag file which had labels placed in the layout gets corrupted such that instead of the usual line ------------- rlabel metal2 -72580 -165 -67246 167 0 pad1 --------------- three lines appear like ------------ rlabel metal2 -72580 -165 -67246 167 0 pad1 rlabel metal2 -72580 -165 -67246 167 0 pad1 ------------ (two rlabel lines and an empty line) Has anyone seen the same behavior? It may be related to my version of Linux (not fully updated RedHat 9 on the smp kernel), as I don't see the behavior with the single processor kernel and a fully updated RedHat 9. I'll try to isolate this bug further. 2. This is more of a user interface enhancement. The "tkcon" terminal provides tab completion, so if one types commands within the terminal one can use backspace to fix a line, or ^a to get to the beginning, etc. But, when coming from the graphics window with the ":" prompt, typing a tab brings one into a state where one has to select the tkcon window to do backspace, then get back to the graphics window to complete the command. I think it would be easier if the ":" prompt would switch the focus to the tkcon window, and one would have a shortcut to switch the focus back to graphics. So, there would only be two states, the "graphics window" and the "tkcon window", not four (or more?) states, the "graphics window", the ": prompt from the graphics window", the "tkcon window", and the "tkcon window with a command initiated by the : prompt". 3. One has to be careful with the "load" and "getcell" commands. If a ".mag" is appended to the filename in the command, it gets written into the ".mag" file. Then, when streaming out, cellnames get replaced by "XXXXXn". Since the tab completion in tkcon appends the ".mag", it is easy to make this mistake. Of course, the mistake can be fixed by massaging the ASCII database with a short script. I would like to note that the system as a whole is very powerful. I prefer Python over Tcl, so I wrote a program which generated 16,000 lines of Magic long commands for a recurring task. I then used "source (name).txt" to execute the commands on a database. It is also possible to write a Tcl wrapper script to run a Python program sending Magic commands to "tkcon". This is not as elegant as having the Python interpreter compiled in but it works. I also would like to note that having the ASCII representation of the database is a huge advantage compared to other (commercial) tools. Keep up the good work. Best regards, Erwin Prinz
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