• Previous message: cfk: "minor magic-7.2.48 issue"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Dear Charles,

> 2. Its really tough to figure out dimensions. I had to jump through a
> couple of hoops and not believe the wiring tool when it is telling me
> "units".

I rewrote a lot of magic routines (esp. the command-line commands) to work
with metric units as well as lambda (and also to take fractional-lambda
values).  However, printed or returned values are generally in internal
units.  I should work on some consistent method for this.  Probably there
should be some command like "units" which will report units in internal
units, lambda, or microns (I think I'll leave out the femto-cubits,
although the parser routine I added will take most standard metric
prefixes).  Then I could simplify the output of the "box" command, and
only print the units which were requested.  I'll try to add that at the
end of the week.

For the TCL wrapper, you can convert units by grabbing the internal-units-
per-lambda with the command "tech lambda", and grabbing the microns-per-
lambda value with the command "cif lambda out".  Note that due to the
"scalable CMOS" idea, lambda units are dimensionless, and the value of
microns-per-lambda can only be determined by the current CIF output
style, since the CIF output style defines the actual physical dimensions
of the layout.

Generally speaking, I agree that "internal units" is a useless measurement
to the end-user and should be avoided.  However, since all magic versions
prior to 7.1 implicitly defined lambda as equal to an internal unit, this
assumption is pervasive, and it's difficult to track down all of the
instances.  Report them as you see them.

					Regards,
					Tim

• Next message: Peter Quigley: "CIF and absolute metric units"
• Previous message: cfk: "minor magic-7.2.48 issue"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]