dfII to xcircuit translator

Hi All

I have often had to present schematics from Cadence DFII for review to
other people. While they are great for CAD, the schematics are rather
ugly looking. When I have to create good-looking schematics, I have to
draw it all over again using xcircuit or xfig.

I am wondering if any one every did a dfII to xcircuit translator. If
not, I think I might attempt one. The plan is to use the dbWriteSkill
function and then do a one to one translation of the dfII functions
into xcircuit tcl. The process may not being completely automated, but
it should go quite some way in producting a usable schematic.

Let me know what you think.

Satya

 

Why are your schematics ugly?

My guess is that you have not created a postscript output format for
dfII to plot the schematics to.

A production Process Design Kit (pdk) should contain the code to
generate reasonable Colour or Black&White images to plot.
These are typically chosen with different primary display colours than
the screen becasue most kits/users prefer a black background for
computor screens and plotting on to White paper. (There are a few
tricks to look out for when setting up a kit in this way, and few are!)

I do recall that we did have one designer who did create a mapping tool
similar to what you suggest, but it was a pain to keep up to date.

-- Gerry

 

Depending on the library, even postscript may look ugly. And xcircuit was
made to make publishing quality circuits, which is definitively not the
case with cadence.

The hassle would not be a result of the author of xcircuit if you told him
what you are doing.

 

Gerry

Sorry for the late reply.My company has dropped newsgroup access and I
have to go through google groups.

Anyways, Cadence DFII schematics are ugly becuase the only drawing
primitive available seems to be lines. Everything else is approximated
using lines. It works fast and all that but the results are not
eye-pleasing. In fact, I think they detract from the circuit.

I think XCircuit is fairly stable and there are relatively few
developers. It shouldn't be too hard to keep up. May be I can even
convince him to include it (I am already speakin as if I have finished
the project!) in XCircuit.