On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 09:28:30AM +1300, Arnim Littek wrote: > On Thu, 19 Nov 2003, John Griessen wrote: > > What might be interesting to us on this list, > > is a look at a sample of a futurenet pinlist. I've never heard of that tool. > > Dash/Futurenet, from Data I/O in the late 80s/early 90s before > it got canned. I used it for front end sch. entry for ASIC work and > later it was the sch. cap tool for Xilinx for a few editions of their > tools, pre-NeoCAD. Of all of the sch. cap tools I've ever used, it > had the best combination of mouse/kybd work I've ever encountered, and > I could use it as fast as pen and paper to put an idea down. > > Was essentially a DOS app, highly optimised assembler all through it, > but got orphaned along the way, for reasons only someone from DataIO > could answer (prima donna programmer no longer available?), when they > went to an inferior Windows-based interface (ECS as I recall). One of > my colleagues liked it so well he persisted, against the odds and with > lots of bandaid glue scripts, in using it for Xilinx work until well > into the late 90s. Can probably come up with some netlist info from > Michael, I'll rattle his cage. > > FWIW, > > Arnim >
That would be great. My specific questions at this point are: ;; Known areas of uncertainty: ;; - is the netlist case sensitive? ;; ;; - any restrictions on netnames with regards to length and ;; characters? For example "unnamed_net4" is long, lowercase, ;; and has an "_". "+5V" starts with a "+". Is this allowed? ;; ;; - Where does the footprint go? Neither pinlist I've seen had ;; footprints. ;; ;; - How are DATA,3 and DATA,4 used? In one example, DATA,4 is ;; not used. In the other DATA,3 and DATA,4 are identical and ;; appear to be set to the value (10.0k for example) of the part. ;; ;; - In the "PIN" and "SIG" lines, what are the various fields really ;; doing? ;; ;; It seems that for a PIN line, its: ;; PIN,,<netname>,1-1,5,<net attribute number>,<pinnumber> ;; so what are the "1-1" and the "5"? On the <net attribute ;; number> I've seen "23", "25", and "100". Maybe these ;; indicate signal vs power or some sort of routing preference? ;; ;; For a SIG line, the format seems to be ;; SIG,<netname>,1-1,5,<netname> ;; ;; But I've seen one example that had: ;; SIG,GND,1-1,5,A ;; ;; Despite this, what exactly are "1-1" and "5"? ;; -Dan --
